Editor’s Note

I spent a couple of weeks last month on call for jury duty in federal court. I sat through two voir dires, got bounced from both, but let’s not get into that. My major ”takeaway” from the experience is that lawyers should be watching more television — specifically, ”Law and Order” and ”CSI.” Everyone on the two panels watched those shows.

I’ve read about the ”CSI effect” in courtrooms — that jurors expect to see evidence pile up and point to an obvious conviction as it does on television — but the lawyers and judges in what I still consider to be ”our” cases seemed a little surprised at the popularity of the shows. The lawyers seemed to fear that jurors would expect them to speak in witty sound bites and dazzle us with the presentation of their cases. Or, as an assistant U.S. attorney asked us, ”You do realize that most of that stuff on ‘CSI’ is made-up?”

Well, I think most people actually get that. I mean, most people who accept their citizen’s duty to serve on a jury — even with the eye-rolling and grumbling that are a mandatory accompaniment to jury service — get the distinction between a Miami Police Department that can solve murders off an eensy-beensy paint scratch and two motes of living-room dust (and all in one day, or at least without a change of clothes) and real life. Jurors, after all, have marriages and divorces, happy children and troubled children, jobs and stretches of unemployment, soccer practices and parents with Alzheimer’s. So, they kind of get it.

But there’s an oddly positive note, constitutionally speaking, that I think lawyers and judges should know about (if you already do, my apologies). I was a little surprised, as I chatted with some fellow panel members in our armed robbery case, to find that, while everyone casually assumed the guy in the ill-fitting clothes did it, they also casually understood that that’s not the end of the story.

Thanks, maybe, to Ed and Lennie and Cyrus and Jack McCoy, people understand that the prosecution has to prove its case, and if they don’t, even if the jurors figure the guy did it, they’ll still let him walk. Because that’s our system. So, I guess that McCoy’s occasional losses, while a sad, sad occurrence for fictional New York, may be a good thing, and a little weekly civics lesson.

And now, back to this month’s issue.

We have two stories on intellectual property, coming at it from different angles.

Our cover story, by Maria Kantzavelos, looks at the growing practice of biotechnology patent law. The biotech industry — and the practice that supports it — began to take off after a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court case, and now the field is growing steadily, as microbiologists and other Ph.D.s in the sciences see the practice of law as a way to work with exciting discoveries in science and help to bring them to the marketplace.

Olivia Clarke, who is now assistant editor, writes about the challenges IP boutique firms face as they try to stay in the game while the large firms move to expand their IP practice areas. The boutiques say they offer clients a greater depth of understanding of the science and technology, but they’re also aware that they need to adapt as large firms offer the full range of client services in addition to strictly patent work that a corporation may need.

Olivia has also written a profile about a determined young lawyer, Heather Nelson-Beverly, who started out with Don Hubert, then left and simply created her own entertainment law firm, which nearly everyone said couldn’t be done in Chicago. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to listen, and Nelson-Beverly has built a very successful practice representing people in all aspects of the music industry.

I also want to point to a couple of columns this month.

Arin Reeves has an insightful take on the reaction to Barack Obama’s speech on race in ”Diversity in Practice”; and Shawn Wood takes a look at lawyers and electronics — not e-discovery, but the discovery that e-, as in e-mail, can cause lawyers lots of embarrassment, to say nothing of employment-related problems.

— Robert Yates