President's Message

Please join me for a special breakfast on September 12th, hosted by Wilmer Hale, where we will have an opportunity to hear from leadership at the USPTO and the Copyright Office in a fireside chat format with opportunities for audience Q&A. Both Robin Evans, Deputy Commissioner for Patents, USPTO and Miriam Lord, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Public Information and Education, US Copyright Office, will join us in person to share their latest initiatives and to answer your questions. You can ask your questions in person or submit them to me in advance at president@bipla.org. Don’t miss this event! Please invite your colleagues and all the foreign counsel who want to connect with you during the adjacent IPO meeting hosted in Boston. At BIPLA, we especially appreciate connecting with foreign counsel who might want to write articles for the newsletter or participate in our annual Symposium and we know that they appreciate opportunities to meet more BIPLA members.

I greatly enjoyed seeing many of you, especially including many attorneys from outside of the US, at our BIO International Convention Happy Hour. As Boston hosted the BIO International Convention this year, we hosted a happy hour so that colleagues could join together for a drink, conversation, and networking during the BIO International Convention. This also helped our members with the near-impossible task of meeting all of their foreign counsel contacts requesting meetings at once!

As a highlight of my spring, I awarded the BIPLA’s Public Service Award to the Honorable Kara Farnandez Stoll of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit at the annual Celebration of the Judiciary in June. If you were not able to attend the event and hear US Navy SEAL and Paralympian Dan Cnossen’s keynote address, I encourage you to read about the event in the newsletter today . A special thanks goes to our sponsoring organizations, who helped make this event possible.

Please mark your calendars for the Annual Meeting, which we will hold on December 6, 2023, to celebrate our year together and address the business of our organization. Keep in mind, too, that we have already announced that the next Symposium will be held at Morgan Lewis on April 10-11, 2024. Mark your calendars!

Thank you for your ongoing commitment to our association. Please continue to remain active, invite your friends and colleagues, and take advantage of the opportunities our association provides for you. I look forward to hearing from you. You can reach me at president@bipla.org.

Rebecca M. McNeill