BIPLA Annual Celebration of the Judiciary

After Judge Stoll’s award acceptance, the keynote speaker, Dan Cnossen, was introduced through a video highlighting his background and accomplishments, including having received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with Valor for his service with the Navy SEALs as well as having won six medals for the U.S. at the 2018 Winter Paralympics in South Korea, in addition to competing at additional Paralympic games. Before starting his speech, Mr. Cnossen assured the crowd that while he did not know anything about IP law, his speech would have a nexus with the challenges we face as IP attorneys—no matter how small or large.

Lt. Commander (ret.) Cnossen provided a roadmap to his presentation and highlighted two stories he planned to tell that related to the question he posed to the crowd: when you are faced with a difficulty and/or a frustration, how are you going to respond to it? For his first story, he captured the crowd’s attention when he said it was about a telephone pole—a comment that raised perplexed looks from the crowd, but he met them with a smile. His story related to his Navy SEAL training where he and his team were faced with carrying a telephone pole along a beach during a difficult week of training. No matter how much he and his team prepared physically and mentally, the task proved to be more challenging than they could have anticipated. But he knew they couldn’t fail. If they did, they risked being removed from Navy SEAL training. With that in mind, he and his team took the task one step at a time—literally. He encouraged his team to get through each moment and use the thought of failure as a motivator, but not as a deterrent from pursuing what all of them had been working so hard for. He and his team did succeed, which led him into his second story. With the Navy SEAL training under his belt, he was deployed on an operation abroad where he faced a life-changing moment when two artillery shells that were improvised as an explosive went off, which led to him waking up in a hospital room in Maryland where he discovered he lost both his legs. He drew even more gasps from the crowd when he explained he learned later that the helicopter rescuing him almost ran out of fuel. At this point in his speech, he turned to the crowd and asked: how does someone become motivated to carry on after something like that happens? He didn’t have an all-solving answer to this—it was a long road to recovery for him and he shared that he spent many days replaying what had happened and asking what he and/or his team could have done differently. Each day, it got a bit easier for him—he said you have to focus on what you still have, such as your life, family, and friends, and keep pushing forward to form your perspective. So, the next time we face a challenge in our career or personal lives, we may find Lt. Commander (ret.) Dan Cnossen’s voice in our head reminding us to break our challenge into the smallest components possible and take it one step at a time.

The BIPLA would like to thank all of the sponsors to date for this event including:

• Gold Sponsors: McNeill Baur; Finnegan, Morgan Lewis
• Silver Sponsors: WilmerHale; Choate; McCarter English; Proskauer; Allen & Overy; Mintz
• Bronze Sponsors: Latham & Watkins; Goodwin; Barnes & Thornburg LLP; K&L Gates; Wolf Greenfield
• Individual Sponsors: Parabellum Capital; Worldwide IP Solutions