Last night was the final trial for my Trial Advocacy in IP class. It's just like a regular trial advocacy class, except the subject matter deals with patent infringement. I'm wondering how much I really like litigating patent infringement: there's something hideously boring and seemingly futile about parsing the complex and obfuscating language describing each invention. It makes me just want to bang the parties' heads together and make them work something out.
I was also wondering how much I liked the class. It met from 5-8pm, which is not a time when I am particularly alert. Especially on days when I began at 6am. Classes were long, and maybe a little tedious. But guess what: it turns out I learned stuff!
My job at yesterday's trial was to cross-examine one witness and do direct examination on another. I was nervous: I'd never really done either before, not the whole thing anyway, and I'd never also handled evidence at the same time. But it went great.
The biggest issue for my side – and in a real trial, this wouldn't have been a factor – was time. We were limited to 15 minutes combined for two cross-examinations and 30 for two directs. But it wasn't really enough time for us to make the cases for the two issues in dispute. (I'd insisted we also do the wrongful termination claim that the case file included because I thought it was more interesting than the patent infringement claim. Patent law seems much more about things, whereas wrongful termination seems much more about people. Others may argue the opposite, but unless there's a wholesale adoption of someone else's patent I just don't see the great injustice when different people's innovations just happen to overlap around the edges.)
I was the second examiner in both cases, and in both instances the person who had gone first had used up time I needed. So I had to improvise my questions and stray from my preplanned ones. For cross that was especially true, and expected, because I couldn't really anticipate what she might have said on direct. I only knew what I wanted to make sure she'd say at some point. But that examination went really well. Now, granted the witness was just a classmate role-playing, and the evidence in the case file made it easy to make the witness out to be sort of unpleasant, but last night it was all about execution, and I skewered her. I picked up on a lot of momentum she'd had during direct, and used it to undermine her own credibility. I also deftly used exhibits and memory refreshment to do this, which is what I'm most happy about since going into the trial I wasn't sure I had the slightest idea how to do that.
Overall I thought my side lawyered the whole thing great, but we still lost. There was no official verdict, but the polled jury seemed to not be comfortable deciding for us on either count. That, too, was a learning experience, because we could see how certain ideas resonated with the jury.
The trial was held in a courtroom at the Federal Courthouse, a gorgeous building on the waterfront. The jury was made up of people each of the acting attorneys brought. I brought my mom. Who I was impressed to see really picked up on the nuance of the patents. But I don't know why I should be so surprised - patent law is in our genes...