MoFo Recruits Patent Talent Through Harvard Partnership

Morrison Foerster was featured in a Law360 article discussing the firm’s unique way to build relationships with the life sciences sector while recruiting new talent through a patent law course in collaboration with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Harvard Biotech Club, a student organization with more than 3,700 global members.

"We take questions during the class through chat," said Michael Ward, who is one of the teachers for the course. "If you're interested in a career in IP, we'll connect you with somebody who's transitioned to become a patent agent. If you work for a company, and you have questions about company formation or licensing technology or how do I patent this stuff, we'll give you 30 minutes of free time kind of thing. And it's been remarkable how successful it's been for us."

Thomas Keane, who graduated from Harvard University in 2021 with a doctorate in chemistry, is now a patent agent at MoFo. He took the firm’s course in 2020 after finding out about it through the school’s chemistry department.

“This career is a great opportunity to use your scientific knowledge and get involved in legal sorts of stuff and work with products being protected by IPs and taken to market," Thomas said. "One of the really helpful things about this course is really just helping to make sure people are aware that this is an option in the first place. I found out patent agents as a job existed even just because a couple people in the Ph.D. lab I worked in went into this sort of field. A lot of people go to grad school and are very set into going into academia or going into industry, but there's not really a lot of publicity about this option."

Read the full article.