On February 2, 2018 at 4:00 pm the John Marshall Law School is offering what promises to be a very interesting CLE presentation by the former Director of its Center for Intellectual Property Law, Richard S. Gruner. Gruner is also former in-house counsel for IBM and the co-author of Transactional Intellectual Property: From Startups to Public Companies (Carolina Academic Press 3rd ed. 2015) and Intellectual Property: Private Rights, the Public Interest, and the Regulation of Creative Activity (West 3rd ed. 2016), as well as the author of Corporate Patents: Optimizing Organizational Responses to Innovation Opportunities and Invention Discoveries. Gruner has a background that promises thoughtfulness and credibility. Here is John Marshall’s description of the presentation:

This presentation is about three things: imagination, invention, and shaping patent law incentives. These seemingly disparate topics are actually linked subjects. Three insights provide the links and are the topics of this talk. First, imagination is subject to predictable flaws, which recent neurological research has helped us to identify and understand. Second, invention is an act of imagination of new tools and the functionality they bring, with such invention subject to the same predictable errors as all types of imagination. Third, patent laws should be crafted to combat these predictable errors in invention processes—that is, with targeted incentives to encourage inventors not to make these errors or to reveal the errors in invention designs as early as possible to ensure that more error-free designs receive patents and are given maximum commercial and public attention.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com.