When I attended law school in the early 1990's, intellectual property law was all the rage. Many of my classmates at the University of San Francisco took classes from Professor J. Thomas McCarthy, a renowned expert in the field. Unfortunately, I mistakenly assumed that intellectual property law was simply a more specialized version of the property law class that I disliked. So I skipped my chance to learn about this cutting edge area because I feared another painful voyage into the depths of fee simple absolutes and joint tenancies. My state of complete ignorance about intellectual property law persisted until I joined a law firm after graduation. I discovered that nearly half of the firm's business litigation cases had some intellectual property component. Luckily, I also found a second chance to learn from Professor McCarthy by consulting his wonderful treatise on trademark and unfair competition law. I referenced Professor McCarthy's treatise often, occasionally mentioning to my colleagues that Professor McCarthy taught at my alma mater. I usually neglected to tell them that I never learned a thing in law school about intellectual property.

If like me you blew your chance to learn about intellectual property in law school, or if you just want to know a little bit more about this growing practice area, this month's magazine is your golden opportunity. This issue features articles by members of our association on a variety of intellectual property issues as well as profiles of local practitioners. I would like to thank all of the authors, especially Kathi Finnerty of Livingston & Mattesich, who served as the president of the Intellectual Property Section in 2003. Kathi helped arrange for several articles, including our cover story about how a local business, Hansen Information Technologies, employs lawyers to safeguard its IP assets.

Even though we have attempted to solicit articles from and about a diverse group of local IP lawyers, I realize that there are a great many lawyers who could have been represented in this issue if space in the magazine were not limited. If you know someone who should have been featured, feel free to contact me. Although we are not likely to revisit the intellectual property theme again for a while, we may be to feature the person we missed in an issue focusing on another topic.