Teaching IP transactions via Zoom

It’s now decided. This year’s one-week course, Intellectual Property Transactions: Law and Practice, will run at the UCL Faculty of Laws from 9-13 November. It will be conducted via Zoom or Teams (apparently some teachers are not allowed to access Zoom on their work computers).

IP Draughts was unsure whether to stretch the course out over several weeks, in view of the online format. We offered several alternatives to the students who were booked on the course, and the most popular response was to stick with the one-week format.

Apart from IP Draughts, who tends to involve himself in most of the talks, this shouldn’t be a problem for the 30-or-so teachers, whose duties vary between an hour or so and half a day. It is mostly the students who will need stamina. We will be increasing the breaks, so that people can stretch their legs and refocus their eyes on a different field of vision.

IP Draughts now has a fair amount of experience of teaching via Zoom. This week he gave three half-day talks. In the coming weeks he is running several one-day talks in half-day bursts. His UCL courses can be found (along with some other UCL courses) here.

Some of the techniques that he has been developing for these courses include:

• running polls – a few alternative answers to a question – and then discussing the answers with the class
• he has decided that referring people to short sections of long documents is quite difficult using the “share” function, and instead he may create extracts either on paper or as Powerpoint slides
• running two screens (one for shared papers, one for seeing the class) has proved too difficult, given the many settings in Zoom or Teams that need to be in place, and which seem to be in different positions each time you use it.

For the one-week course, we are thinking of using a “Jeopardy” format (matching answers to questions) for the daily workshops. Some of you will know what this means!

We are looking forward to welcoming this year’s cohort of students on the course. If you haven’t yet booked, you can apply here. See you there!

Online courses from IP Draughts and UCL

UCL Laws has been advertising IP Draughts’ forthcoming one-day courses for some time. The current batch is being held via Zoom for a reduced price. Details can be found on the UCL Laws Events pages here.

We are running each of these courses as two half-days, i.e. Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Next week’s course is definitely going ahead and is one that has been popular for about 15 years: Drafting Legal Clauses in Commercial Contracts.

The following week, IP Terms in Research Contracts is scheduled (subject to numbers booking).

IP Draughts will be using the camera and microphone that the European Patent Academy sent him some years ago, when he ran a series of webinars for them on IP licensing. The experience that he gained then has been very useful in managing the current batch of training courses. One of IP Draughts’ colleagues will be on hand to manage the chat function, though we hope that you will participate by asking questions and commenting live via the video link.

We are all becoming very experienced at using Zoom, so IP Draughts expects next week’s course to run smoothly!

Mediating disputes over IP agreements

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Last November, IP Draughts attended a 5-day course on mediation skills, run by CEDR – the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution. CEDR is the leading provider of mediation services in the UK. The final two days of the course were an assessment of all the students in role-plays, where we took it in turns to be the assessed mediator, or a representative of the parties in dispute. IP Draughts particularly enjoyed playing the role of a grumpy elder brother in a dispute over a will.

Today, as promised by our teachers, we received our assessments. IP Draughts is delighted (and more than a little relieved) to discover that he passed, and he can now call himself a CEDR Accredited Mediator.

This follows his attendence, nearly 10 years ago, at the 2-day mediation course run by WIPO – the World Intellectual Property Organisation – in Geneva. There was no formal assessment at that course, but WIPO were prepared to add IP Draughts to their list of mediators, which he took as a sign that he hadn’t entirely disgraced himself.

A fair proportion of the agreements that IP Draughts encounters include an obligation on the parties to consider (or perhaps even go to) mediation before adopting a final dispute resolution process. The final dispute resolution process is typically either litigation in the courts of a named jurisdiction, or arbitration. Where there is a reference to mediation, the clause often also names a mediation body that will oversee the mediation and perhaps choose the mediator. CEDR is often named as the mediation body, at least in agreements drafted in the UK. CEDR’s model mediation clauses and mediation agreements can be found here.

It is not, strictly, necessary to name a mediation body, but doing so ensures that the process is a “known quantity”. Although the mediation process may vary in an individual case, a typical CEDR mediation is a one-day event and might cost in the region of £5,000, which allows for one day of preparation by the mediator, as well as attending the day of the hearing. The costs would typically be shared equally by the parties. The parties would, of course, also have to bear their own costs of preparing for and attending the mediation, eg the costs of their legal team.

If you simply refer to CEDR mediation without naming a mediator, IP Draughts understands that you will be allocated someone on their panel, though he needs to check whether parties can choose someone not on their panel. The panel is not the same as their (much larger) list of accredited mediators, and is in effect an inner circle of trusted mediators.

IP Draughts intends to build up a mediation practice, in addition to his other roles including practising as a lawyer in his firm Anderson Law LLP. He hopes you will consider naming him as the chosen mediator in agreements concerned with technology or IP, provided he has no conflict of interest such as regularly advising your organisation.

 

UCL IP Transactions course 2020 – bookings open

From 20-24 April 2020, we will be running the 8th annual outing of the popular, one-week course, Intellectual Property Transactions: Law and Practice, at University College London’s Faculty of Laws.

Several hundred people have attended the course in recent years – mostly junior IP lawyers but also patent and trade mark attorneys, licensing managers, and lawyers moving into a transactional IP role. Past attenders have been from many countries of the world, eg Japan and Colombia, as well as places closer to home. The course has a practitioner focus and combines formal teaching with practice-based sessions and workshops.

We are now getting a steady stream of applications for this year’s course. If you would like to attend, please complete the application form (which forms part of the course brochure – see link at foot of page here) together with a CV and personal statement to Lisa Penfold at UCL Laws.

While in sales mode, IP Draughts would like to remind you that the 4th edition of his book, Technology Transfer (Bloomsbury Publishing) will be published in the next 2-3 months. In the last few days we approved the final text, and just have to write the preface before the work is sent off the printers. The first edition was written two and a half decades ago.