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High tech industries are not only lucrative, but also highly innovative and dynamic. Large firms are not their sole source of innovation, however.
Overlapping ownership of large publicly traded companies in the United States has grown dramatically in recent decades. The list of largest shareholders of almost any publicly traded company has a similar set of shareholders, namely the largest asset managers.
In the United States, and in every single patent system in the world, one patentability doctrine—the nonobviousness doctrine—stands as the cornerstone of the patent bargain. This bargain ensures that the government only grants the monopoly associated with a patent when the inventor has created something sufficiently different from what came before.
Most clients likely believe that their lawyers have provided outstanding service in such contexts—and most clients are likely correct in that assessment. Given that most lawsuits settle3 and that lawyers play a central role in settlement negotiations and decision-making, however, we must assume that at least some lawyers sometimes fall short of the profession’s standards of care in the settlement context.