Hot New Niche: Lawyers Who Speak Science
Demand for specialists driven by an explosion in patent applications.
MSNBC:
In a span of 7 years, Loretta Weathers (photo) 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… read on.
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