The summit, which included a roundtable discussion on diversity consisting of in-house counsel and law firms, and a panel discussion with participating companies about careers in IP, drew 200 attendees and highlighted an issue of growing importance to the IP community.
"The pipeline of women and minorities in IP is very small," said Bruce Jackson, senior attorney at Microsoft and one of the creators of the event, the fourth such summit that Microsoft has organized. "So we asked, ‘how do we address this?’"
The event was sponsored by law firms Davis Wright Tremaine, K&L Gates, Fish & Richardson, Klarquist Sparkman, Covington & Burling, Woodcock Washburn and Shook Hardy & Bacon, and included representatives from companies including AOL, IBM, Verizon and Viacom.
In the roundtable discussion, participants discussed strategies for hiring diverse talent and the challenges of retaining and developing that talent. Some of the approaches included establishing mentorship programmes and hiring diversity consultants to help with recruitment.
During the panel discussion on careers in IP, representatives of the participating companies spoke to law students about possible career paths and addressed ways of entering the field, the reasons that IP is important and the range of avenues available to them.
"There is a shortage of women and minority partners generally, but in the area of IP it’s even greater," said Jackson. He said that one explanation for this is the tendency for people to equate IP with patent law. "Patent law isn’t viewed as very exciting and it’s often assumed that one needs a science and engineering background to practice it, but there are other avenues," he said. "There are other opportunities for patent lawyers and our job at the summit is to expose them to that."
While there are no hard statistics on women and minority IP attorneys, the numbers are relatively low, especially at the partner level. This poses a problem for companies, whose clients are becoming increasingly diverse in part due to globalization. "If women and minority attorneys are non-existent in law firms, where do we get them?" Jackson said.
Jackson said that corporations and law firms are facing the same problems in hiring and maintaining diverse practitioners and need to collaborate.
"The bottom line is that diversity is good for business," said Joe Lee, a senior attorney with Microsoft. "Clients want to be comfortable and deal with people who are similar to them."
During the evening networking reception, students were able to speak with representatives of the sponsoring firms and submit their resumes. "I talked to a number of students who thought it was a fantastic event," said Lee.
"The summit also brings together a lot of different companies who are competitors," said Jackson. "We put that aside because we have a common goal of increasing the bar for women and minorities."
