Hot new niche: Lawyers who speak science

Classroom demographics changing
Stanford professor Mark Lemley, a noted patent lawyer involved in two of the recent Supreme Court cases, sees the legal landscape changing even within his classroom. Next to the more traditional law students with liberal arts backgrounds, he now finds a growing number of science majors of varying ages and backgrounds.

Last year, 140 students piled into his Introduction to Intellectual Property course, making it the largest class at the school

“That’s the kind of thing that 15 years ago would have been inconceivable,” said Lemley, whose recent work includes a friend-of-court brief in a Supreme Court patent-infringement fight involving eBay.

To harness that interest, Stanford is joining the handful of law schools that have started joint degree programs in science and law.

Stanford’s law school dean, Larry Kramer, sensed the need for the program after moving to the Silicon Valley from New York University a few years ago.

“This is what the industrial revolution was two centuries ago, and it will have that kind of significance in the world,” Kramer said.

The field is also lucrative, especially compared with an academic career in the sciences.

The pay is nice, too
Newly minted lawyers will earn $160,000 at the nation’s top firms this year, and perhaps more with a postgraduate science degree or federal clerkship. The leading intellectual property firms plan to match or top that figure.

“You do make quite a bit more money than you do as a researcher or scientist,” Weathers said, “but I wouldn’t say that was my motivation.”

Among other things, she missed using her writing and communication skills. “I got to the point where I no longer wanted to sit in front of a computer terminal going over graphs,” Weathers said.

At Woodcock Washburn, a three-city intellectual property firm with 90 attorneys, the dress is casual and most colleagues share her science background. She has worked on cases that directly touch on her physics training, such as a patent fight over blue LED lights, and on litigation that lets her dabble in different kinds of technology.

Ramon Tabtiang, 36, a native of Thailand, earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California-San Francisco and spent two years at MIT doing postdoctoral work. But he, too, ultimately pursued a law career, earning a degree while working full time as a technical specialist at Fish & Richardson, a firm in Boston.

Tabtiang came to feel that future breakthroughs in the life sciences would be incremental at best. And while academia offered intellectual freedom, he found it came at a price — the far lower salary.

“I think every individual, at one point or another — having a family or wanting a different lifestyle — is forced to confront the question of whether they really want to work in the pure sciences,” said Tabtiang, a married father of two.

At his firm, Tabtiang can apply his scientific training in new ways — perhaps helping a university form a startup company, or a pharmaceutical firm seek a new drug patent.
It’s hard stepping away from the lab, he said, “but once you do, you realize there’s sort of alternate universes with their own attractions and flaws.”

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