I have never sat on an admissions committee for Harvard or Princeton, but I now have much more empathy for their difficult task. How do you make the cut among so many qualified applicants? We began soliciting nominations for our Top IP People Under 45 feature last winter- – 230 impressive individuals were proposed, some multiple times. To anyone who didn’t make our 50-person list, here are some of the reasons.
Like any Ivy League admissions committee, we were looking for a certain amount of diversity. That meant we wanted to include representatives from the many facets of IP: trademark, copyright, patent and trade secrets, and different kinds of practices, such as litigation, transaction and policy work. Likewise, we wanted to include a wide range of geography and top-notch law firms, and for the most part included only one person from each firm. And we limited the attorneys to those who practice U.S. law.
