Helping make dreams a reality
Students in the Intellectual Property and Transaction Clinic help clients turn their dreams into strategic business ventures. Clients include entrepreneurs, authors, artists, inventors, musicians, publishers, and individuals operating small businesses or nonprofit organizations. These clients are confronting complex and crucial issues pertaining to business formation and organization, copyright and trademark registration and protection, licensing, and small business transactions. Without legal help, their ventures may never get off the ground.
Specific projects for students of the Intellectual Propery and Transaction Clinic include:
• Filing and prosecuting trademark registration applications and renewals at the USPTO
• Filing and prosecuting copyright registration applications at the Copyright Office
• Representing clients before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in ex parte appeals and inter partes proceedings
• Preparing licensing, non-disclosure, manufacturing, distribution, founders, LLC, split sheet, and work for hire agreements
• Negotiating settlement agreements
• Counseling clients in areas of trademark selection, IP protection, selection of lP holder, clearance for using copyrightable content, choice of entity, and cease and desist letter/adversarial IP matters
• Filing for recognition of tax exempt status with the IRS
IP & Transaction Clinic client business fields have included food (animal and human), beverage (alcoholic and non-alcoholic), apparel, kitchenware, jewelry, cosmetics, textiles, stationary, publications, computer peripherals, musical instruments, solar energy, education, entertainment, software, promotion (environment, positive attitude, mindfulness, entrepreneurism), audio/video production, consulting, restaurants, retail stores, charitable services, tourism, and medical services. Authors, visual artists, film makers, and musicians are another important contingent of IP & Transaction Clinic clients in need of filings, agreements, and counseling in the realm of copyright.
The UNH Franklin Pierce IP & Transaction Clinic is a participating law school clinic in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Law School Clinic Program. Under this program, students apply for limited recognition to practice before the USPTO. With limited recognition, students are treated as attorneys capable of entering their appearance and submitting filings to the USPTO under clinician supervision and for clinic cases in the program.
The IP & Transaction Clinic includes two components: classroom for lawyering skills appurtenant to the practice of a diverse IP portfolio of matters and office hours for case work and supervision. The Advanced IP & Transaction Clinic is for students needing a greater number of case work hours or who previously completed the basic IP & Transaction Clinic (most notably, the classroom component). This Clinic is taught by professor Ashlyn Lembree.
Listen to Professor Lembree on The Legal Impact podcast discussing her case Edible Arrangements v. Edible Commerce Consulting, which UNH Franklin Pierce's Intellectual Property and Transaction Clinic represented the local company Edible Commerce Consulting.
