With speakers representing nine different states and a record one-day symposium attendance record, the Texas A&M Law Review’s Inaugural Intellectual Property Symposium on Friday, Oct. 25, 2013, proved to be a great success.

According to 3L Matt Fronda, symposium editor, the law review board decided to do their fall symposium on the topic of intellectual property due in part because of the (then) pending acquisition talks with Texas A&M University.

“When we took over in March of last year, we were unsure of where the law school was going to go (the acquisition was still in the rumors stage at that point). But we knew that Texas A&M has a large engineering program, and that if the deal with A&M did work out, there would likely be a lot of Aggie IP lawyers that we could contact as resources,” Fronda said.

Fish & Richardson and Munck Wilson Mandala, LLP were the sponsors for the inaugural IP symposium, and Professor Lucas Osborn, Director of Intellectual Property Law Program at Campbell University, provided the keynote presentation, “Pirates, PhD’s, and Preservation: How 3-Dimensional Printers Open New Avenues – and Challenges – in the Arts.”

Additional presenters for the day included Professor Peter Yu, Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law and Director of Intellectual Property Law Center at the Drake University Law School; Professor Steven Jamar, Associate Director at the Institute of Intellectual Property & Social Justice at Howard University School of Law; Professor Sergio Sarmimento, adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law; Professor Sidney Beckman, Lincoln Memorial University – Duncan School of Law; Professor Susan Richey, University of New Hampshire School of Law; Professor Megan Carpenter, Director of Center for Intellectual Property at Texas A&M School of Law; Professor Michael Murray, Valparaiso University Law; and Professor Jon Garon, Northern Kentucky University.

According to Fronda, although the professors were from a variety of different schools across the nation, many of them had worked together in the past.

“One thing that surprised me was that on Thursday night we had a dinner with the speakers who all came in from different states (nine speakers from nine states), and yet they all knew each other already,” Fronda said.

“We had speakers giving each other hugs and catching up with each other. I think that I learned that the experts in a given field are a very small and close-knit group.”