Hot new niche: Lawyers who speak science

By Maryclaire Dale

updated 2:40 p.m. ET May 20, 2007

PHILADELPHIA - In a span of seven years, Loretta Weathers moved from a plasma physics laboratory at MIT to a federal courtroom, trading long days of crunching data for the adrenalin rush of high-stakes litigation.

The daughter of a Detroit autoworker, she had been tinkering with gadgets since she was a child. But after a few semesters in the prestigious Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she abandoned the solitude of the lab for a journey that took her to law school and an unexpected career as a patent lawyer.

It’s one of the hottest niches in law: the lawyer-scientist who understands technology and can explain it to a jury.

“It’s maybe not as sexy as defending a murderer, but it’s sexy in a different way,” said Weathers, 31, who clerked with the federal appeals court in Washington that handles patent disputes.

Even in her first year on the job, Weathers got to work on a copyright-infringement case involving an insurance company that netted a nearly $19 million verdict. She put her science and math skills to work behind the scenes, building a database of more than 1,000 acts of alleged infringement.

Patent application explosion
Demand for these specialists is being driven by an explosion in patent applications in recent years and a growing need for lawyers to protect old patents or challenge new ones. The U.S. Patent Office estimates 450,000 patent applications will be filed this year, up from about 350,000 five years ago.

Law professors say they’re seeing more students with strong science backgrounds make the leap to law, where recruiters are snapping them up.

For at least some students who might otherwise gravitate toward a science career, the promise of much bigger paydays is a powerful lure. Others say the opportunities in academia are not as certain as they once were.

“It’s an exciting area of legal practice right now,” said University of Pennsylvania law professor R. Polk Wagner. “Every year I see more and more people coming into law school with technical backgrounds.”

“It almost scares me,” said Wagner, whose proteges include Weathers. “Who’s left in the lab?”

Academia seen as too narrow a path
Stanford University law student Dan Knauss left the lab at least in part to spread his wings. Knauss, who earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin, thought academia would force him onto too narrow a path.

“One thing I didn’t like in pure science was how much you had to specialize,” Knauss said, “People who leave technical fields and go into law, they want to be in the interface, where science meets society.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has also become interested in patent law, taking up more than a dozen cases, and it issued a highly anticipated ruling last month on the question of “obviousness” that could make it easier to challenge existing patents.

Congress, for its part, seems ready to address the issue of patent reform. Critics say that patents are being granted too easily and invite litigation that stifles, rather than rewards, innovation.

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