Pro Hac Vice saxophonist Joe Newman, far left, me, Chief Judge Rader, center, and drummer Matt Ling, right at AIPLA's dessert reception sponsored by Finnegan

I was not able to post while traveling the past couple of weeks.  It was an interesting combination of professional activities and music performances.

First up was Los Angeles, where I gave a presentation and had meetings at UCLA School of Law on how they might develop a clinic similar to the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic I founded at UW Law. I’ve advised on how to do this at several schools over the past few years. It has been gratifying to see the model adopted at many of them.

After that, I was on a panel at the Judicial Conference of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims at the wonderful Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, CA. My topic was the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Stanford v. Roche, on which I will add a post shortly. My good friend and bandmate Chief Judge Randall Rader of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was giving the lunch keynote at the conference, and so we then also performed as a duo at the cocktail reception afterwards.

From there, we were both at AIPLA’s  Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and we got the full rock band together to perform. We had a great slot at 11 pm Friday night for the dessert reception hosted by the law firm of Finnegan Henderson. The event was in the ballroom of the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, and was probably the largest and fanciest venue we have played to date. We had a high energy show and even had professional musician Mark Rivera join us on stage. Someone from Managing IP magazine was there and gave us a 5 star review.

At present we are called Pro Hac Vice as a play on the fact that we all live in different cities and just occasionally show up somewhere to do a show. But now that we’re playing somewhat more regularly we think we need a new name. The current line-up is:

Sean O’Connor: vox, guitar, harmonica

Randall Rader: vox, tambourine, guitar, and cowbell

Matt Bryan: vox, bass

Jon Knight: vox, keyboards, 2nd guitar

Matt Ling: drums

Joe Newman: vox, saxophone

You can see us performing (with a different line-up) at the CASRIP Hi-tech Summit Conference reception sponsored by Seed IP Law Group here in Seattle this past summer, in this video posted at IP attorney and regular CASRIP speaker Karen Canady’s website.

Next up, we’ll get serious about some legal issues in a post about IP ownership–especially in the university context–in the wake of Stanford v. Roche.