Patent Law

When it Comes to Web Searches, We're Incompetent and Irritable: What's an IP Litigator to Do?

By Les Weinstein, Michael Young, John Leo Wagner, Eric van Ginkel, and Victoria Pynchon

Recently, I've noticed Yahoo telling me the number of seconds I've been waiting to get my hands on my email when it doesn't appear instantaneously.  I'm  a little abashed when I realize I'm already getting annoyed by the time Yahoo  informs me I've been waiting for only 22.546 seconds.  

Now Be Specific debunks the myth of a google generation of computer scholars who search the  technological Library of Alexandria with grace and ease.  (pictured here:  the new Alexandrian library)

Not only are our children impatient with the internet's search and navigation functions, so are those who used to spend their time in dusty archives after laboriously flipping through the tattered index cards of the Dewey Decimal System -- University Professors.

We are all, says a recent report from the Brits, not only lacking the "critical and analytical skills [necessary] to assess the information that [we] find on the web" but so impatient that we demonstrate "zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying [our] information needs.  Click here for the full short report (wait time:  3.5 seconds).

This is not good news for IP negotiators.  Our impatience to "get on with it" is probably the primary reason for the breakdown of negotiations for the settlement of IP litigation. 

This is not surprising because no one likes to sit for long in the uncomfortable (but creatively generative) process of exploring the business interests of our bargaining partners when we are pretty certain of the righteousness of our cause and the demonic nature of our opposition.

In survey after survey, lawyers report that the best mediators are patient and persistent.  This is reason alone to bring your IP opponents over to your favorite mediator for whom patience is a central daily practice. 

Thanks to Les Weinstein for passing Be Specific along to us.  We'll be adding it to our Favorite Blogs Link this weekend.

Off to work!

Full post as published by IP ADR Blog on January 17, 2008 (boomark / email).