Valerie Dawson took six months of maternity leave last year, and when she got back to Fenwick & West, she found that her practice had changed quite radically. The litigator continued to deal with copyright, trademark and trade secret issues, but between February and September, suddenly the vast number of those issues were arising in the context of the Internet.
“There was a sea change from before I went on maternity leave to when I came back,” Dawson says. “The issues just seem to come fast and furiously — the number of Internet issues and the urgency of the Internet issues.”
