Attorney and Partner, Steptoe and Johnson

My name is Michael Allan, I'm a 1998 graduate of the law school. I work at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington D.C. and I am chair of the copyright practice and co-chair of the trademark practice. So, intellectual property is a property right much like real property. If you own a house or a car or a physical thing, this is sort of intangible. It's an intangible piece of property and asset. It could be an idea, it could be an invention, it could be some sort of source designation you have for branding. It could be some particular piece of know how that would constitute a trade secret, so it's anything that doesn't have a physical.. Necessarily, have a physical attribute to it, but is nonetheless very valuable and protectable. And, you know, some companies in the world, their most valuable assets are entrepreneurial properties, their patents, their trademarks, their copyrights, their trade secrets, those sorts of things. I represent a lot of companies in the luxury brand space that have very valuable trademarks and we go after folks that infringe those trademarks. I represent several companies, particularly in the music space, that their entire value of their company is based on the copyrights they own in their songs. So, when people infringe those songs, we go after those folks. I'm also involved on the trade secret side in defending a lot of companies that are accused of trade secret theft, and most times these are international cases. Competitor to competitor type cases, which can wind up in very substantial litigations. What I do and what kind of decisions I make? It's every one of them.. It's from staffing the case to what are the complaints, what are the accounts we put in the complaint, or for affirmative defenses we put in the answer.. What's the discovery plan, who are the witnesses we take or defend, what experts do we need and who are they, what's the trial strategy plan, who do we have for the trial team, what's the theme of the case.. The theme is really hugely important from kind of the get go, and, you know, if you actually go to trial, what do you argue to the juries, assuming there's a jury? What works, what's not gonna work? A lot of times these are very technically complicated cases and you've got to really explain this to, you know, depending on your jurisdiction, eight, ten, twelve laypeople who don't understand a lot of this stuff, and so, you know, kind of the whole package soup to nuts is what I have to look at when I take a case in and kind of prepare the case to give it the best shot we have for winning.