Artist's Rendering of Lawyers at the MIP Forum

I spent most of the day at the MIP forum that I introduced here a couple of days ago:

The two-day seminar, which runs tomorrow and Wednesday, is organized by Managing Intellectual Property magazine and is geared toward Chinese companies doing business overseas, hence the title “Protecting China’s Innovation Overseas”.

This also explains my lack of blogging.

Anyway, the event was great stuff. It was well attended, particularly by quite a few in-house lawyers from Chinese companies. The presentations, which by and large were quite informative, covered U.S., EU, Southeast Asia, and Japan intellectual property issues.

The last panel discussion of the day, the one I moderated, was on the in-house counsel/outside counsel relationship. I introduced the topic on Tuesday, so I won’t go through all that again. It seemed to go rather smoothly, and although we ran into time pressure, we were able to field a few questions from the audience about legal budgets, how outside counsel is selected, creative fee structuring, and the current general quality of Chinese IP counsel.

I put in my opinion when appropriate, but most of the work was handled by Michael Lin, in-house patent lawyer for P&G in Beijing (his practice covers other parts of Asia as well), and Alan Adcock, IP lawyer at Tilleke & Gibbins in Bangkok. Those two guys did a wonderful job and made me look like I spent much more time in preparation than I actually did.

I’ve been to some horrid conferences and some good ones. This was one of the good ones. Hats off to Peter Ollier and his crew at MIP. I will be participating in another MIP forum in September in Hong Kong and am now very much looking forward to it.

China Hearsay posting should be back to normal tomorrow.