Welcome to IP @ the U, a periodic newsletter for students, alumni, faculty and friends of the University of Utah College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. 

If you have news about IP events, accomplishments and milestones, please send them to our Program Director, Jorge Contreras.

We are delighted to announce that the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Program at the College of Law was ranked this as the #26 IP program nationally by U.S. News and World Report. This is the highest ranking yet for our IP program, and thanks are due to our talented faculty, staff and students for this achievement!

The College of Law was privileged to host the Utah State Bar IP Section’s 26^th Annual IP Summit in February. The IP Summit is the biggest annual IP event in the state, and we welcomed more than 300 judges, practitioners, and academics from across the country to our campus. At the Summit, COL students Jennifer Williams (2L) and Nicholas Sauer (3L) were each awarded the IP Section’s annual IP scholarship.

In April, Andres Cervantes-Morales (3L), coached by adjunct faculty members Sam Noel and Dan Thomas, and with the assistance of Jordan Cobabe (’23), provided patent filing advice to 21 interdisciplinary student teams from across the state as part of the Center for Medical Innovation’s annual Bench to Bedside (B2B) competition. Teams developed innovative biomedical products ranging from software and apps to medical devices and instrumentation. Among the teams that we assisted were C-Blu (Grand Prize Winner), OrthoBolt (Grand Prize Runner-Up), Soundpass (Legacy Grand Prize), Code Clock (Patient Safety Technology Challenge), CathSecure (Best in Business), AdhesioNix (Eccles & Marriott Libraries Award) and T-Scope (Consumer's Choice).

The College of Law was pleased to co-sponsor the University of Utah’s new academic Center for Antitrust and Consumer Protection Law and Economics, which was officially approved this fall. The Center will continue the ongoing policy work of the Utah Antitrust Project, formed in 2019 by members of the Department of Economics and the College of Law. In October, the Antitrust Project, in conjunction with the College of Law, hosted a conference on “The New Merger Guidelines: Controlling Case Law and New Economics” featuring government officials, academics and practitioners from around the country.

Congratulations to Matthew Petersen (2L) and Jeremy Pratt (2L), coached by Prof. Dave Johnson, who won the best brief award at the local round of the Giles Sutherland Rich Memorial IP Moot Court Competition, and then advanced to the quarterfinals of the regional round. This year's problem involved the fair-use exception to copyright infringement and a preliminary injunction.

Our faculty have been engaged in scholarship at the cutting-edge of IP law and have published and presented their work at conferences around the world. Professor Jonas Anderson has been conducting research on judicial competition for patent cases as well as third-party litigation finance. Professor Jorge Contreras has recently spoken about the patent jurisdiction of the International Trade Commission, the interaction of open-source code software and technical standardization, genomic data resources and historical gender bias in patent law. In October, Professor Contreras’ book The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA was the subject of a special symposium hosted by the Texas A&M Journal of Property Law, which invited commentary about the book from scholars around the country. See recent faculty scholarship.

Learn more about the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law on our website.