Studying Patent Law
Blas P. Arroyo describes his decision to attend law school at Washington and Lee University following graduation from NC State and how his engineering degree complimented his interests in patent law.
Interview on 2012-09-20 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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After graduation I went to
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law school at Washington & Lee in Lexington.
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I mentioned Dean Hawkins before as someone who had a lot of influence on me
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and who was a great mentor really to me on campus
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and gave me a lot of good direction and feedback.
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I was talking to him about law schools and what I might do,
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and also at that time I didn't know whether I could get into any of them.
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And I didn't know where I wanted to live ultimately, had no idea.
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So he mentioned Washington & Lee to me. I'd never heard of it.
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He had lived in Lexington for a time working for Sigma Nu, the national fraternity.
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[They] had a headquarters in, of all places, Lexington, Virginia,
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and it was a small place, the mountains. He talked about the school
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and he said that the law school was very small
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and that the thing about it was the people that knew about W&L had very high respect for them-
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a lot of people didn't know anything about them but those that did-and that
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their graduates generally came from a large number of different places,
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so that got me interested in W&L.
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I looked into it and I applied there along [with]-I thought Florida,
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being from Florida and in state, and that always helps how many students you could admit,
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and I applied to different law schools,
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and thankfully I got in to W&L and they were very gracious and provided
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scholarship money so I was able to attend there.
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So I went to W&L, and it was aside or co-equals with State.
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It was a great experience.
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I wanted to try something small after having been at State
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and the small law school in particular really appealed to me
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because at that time I could read
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and I would look at the catalogs and the section I would look at was the section that described
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how many seats there were in the first year classrooms
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versus how many seats there were in the second year classrooms,
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and if I was able to get into a law school and do all the work of a first year student
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I did not want to go somewhere where it was planned that only so many are going to come back for their second year.
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I wanted somewhere that was going to stick with you, and W&L more than delivered on all those things.
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I felt academically prepared. I was concerned about the stereotypes about engineers or chemists,
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that the English language is a mortal enemy in terms of how much experience I'd had in writing,
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and knowing that in law school the other students-.
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I think I was the only person in my class who had a technical background.
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But the background of State
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relative to the performance in law school and career,
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it ended up having a huge effect
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because what I do today is I practice in the field of patent law
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which is focused and is obviously technology oriented
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and in order to be admitted to the patent bar
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you must have a technical degree.
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So while what I do is primarily contested cases, litigation,
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where you do not actually have to be admitted to the patent bar to do what I do,
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the part that I do in the patent field,
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in order to be a licensed patent attorney in the patent office
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you have to have a traditional technical background.
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So it was really the background.
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The decision in the first place to try something technical and to do it
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in what I felt might be a friendly environment like NC State
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directly influenced ultimately what my career ended up being
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in the legal field, because when I started at W&L
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I did not even know patent law existed,
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so there was no grand plan that I want to go and get a technical degree
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because I'm going to pursue-as some people do now,
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and know about it.
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Patent law was just not very well known at the time,
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so it's just sort of something that happened.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.