A leader in intellectual property and legal education, Dean Megan Carpenter’s path shows the importance of taking risks and always looking forward to the next challenge. Learn her educational journey as a student and teacher, her experience as an IP attorney, and what she views as the future of UNH Franklin Pierce’s legal programs.
This is Profiles, a special series of the podcast The Legal Impact, where you get to know the powerhouse people at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law.
Get an email when the latest episode releases and never miss our weekly episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify!
UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law is now accepting applications for JD, Graduate Programs, and Online Professional Certificates at https://law.unh.edu
Read the Transcript
A. J. Kierstead:
A leader in intellectual property and legal education, Dean Megan Carpenter's path shows the importance of taking risks, and always looking forward to the next challenge. Learner educational journey as a student and teacher, her experience as an IP attorney and what she views as the future of UNH Franklin Pierce's legal programs. This is Profiles, a special series of the podcast, The Legal Impact, where you get to know the powerhouse people at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law.
A. J. Kierstead:
UNH Franklin Pierce is now accepting applications for JD graduate programs and online professional certificates. Learn more and apply at law.unh.edu. So Dean Carpenter, your career spanned various aspects of education, especially in the realm of intellectual property. But you mentioned before we started that you had an important experience in high school that was very influential to how you molded your career. Can you dive into that?
Megan Carpenter:
When I was a junior and senior in high school, I went to a girls boarding school outside of Washington, DC called Madeira. And it was very different from the experience I had growing up. I grew up in the mountains of West Virginia in public school, my whole life. And I had teachers that were very dedicated to what they did, but the sort of socioeconomic difference between girl's boarding school in Washington DC and growing up in Appalachia, was stark to me. And so I think a lot of my ideas about bringing education to different communities, and access to quality legal education, really have followed my career to this day. When I was at Madeira as a junior, I experienced for the first time a program they have called the co-curriculum. And in that program, one day a week we didn't attend classes, but we went to work.
Megan Carpenter:
And so we were in class on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, but on Wednesdays we spent the day doing something, contributing voluntarily to some organization that was meaningful to us. Sophomores all worked in schools and hospitals, juniors all worked on Capitol Hill for a Congress person or a Senator. And then seniors could kind of mold their experience as an internship, wherever they found their passion, something that they thought they might want to build on.
Megan Carpenter:
And so through that program, I feel like that program really has been core to me as I have tried to integrate experiential education in law schools, as I've been teaching throughout the last, nearly 20 years. Because I really think that the theory and the practice both come together to create what is a top-notch education. But the classroom learning is incredibly important. And thinking about reading theory, reading cases, have engaging in deep discussion, all of that really informs the practical aspect of learning. But then practice, experiential education grounds the theory. And so while I didn't sort of fully realize what was happening at the time when I was a teenager, it's something that I have thought back to for the last 30 some years throughout my own career, as I have been in higher education administration.
A. J. Kierstead:
And how did that help guide you into your decision to what you were going to study in undergrad?
Megan Carpenter:
I went to West Virginia university. So after having left home at 14 to go to boarding school, I returned. I planned on just returning for a year. I had deferred admission. I was headed to an Ivy league school and deferred admission to it for a year, in part because my brother and sister were much younger than I, and my sister had to write in elementary school. She had to write an autobiography. And on my page it said, "my sister gives me really good presents, but I don't know her very well because she doesn't live with us". So I thought I should take some time to kind of go back and spend some more time with my family, and go to her games and experience that sort of life. So I ended up attending the West Virginia university all the way through.
Megan Carpenter:
While I was there, I really fell in love with language and international politics. And all of that was really tied up in some of the experiences that I had in the co-curriculum program at my boarding school. I interned for a Congressman from Illinois, from Chicago, when I was a junior. And then I had two jobs, one at a news broadcasting organization doing global work for a semester, at the Christian science monitor.
Megan Carpenter:
And then in the other part of the year, I worked with second language students, immigrants who were attending high school and for whom English was a second language. So I was teaching English as a second language to them, I was also teaching them math. I directed their school play. It was really quite an experience, to these students who also were, a lot of times they had one job, two jobs outside just trying to make a living in order to create a better life for themselves.
Megan Carpenter:
Having recently come to this country. So all of that kind of fused together. And then in college I studied international and comparative politics, human rights, women's studies, and languages, foreign languages. So I graduated then with a master's in Spanish as well.
A. J. Kierstead:
That's fascinating. And then you ended up going on to get your JD at West Virginia College of Law also. And it's kind of interesting that it feels like going into your JD, it was very traditional, like criminal justice, international politics, things like that works really well. And then you transitioned to intellectual property. So how did that happen?
Megan Carpenter:
That's such a good question. I think it's one of those things that I always try to tell students now that you should go into something with intention. Like you feel like you have an idea of what your passion is, and you should absolutely pursue that, but don't hesitate for a minute to kind of keep yourself open to those random things that happen, that send you down a different path that you may not have expected.
Megan Carpenter:
So I think of that when traveling, you know, you're in another country and you kind of see this restaurant on the corner and you think I could go there. And then all of a sudden around the corner, you see this little alley and you pursue that and you find this incredibly cool coffee shop. When I started practicing, I started working at KNL Gates, which was then Kirkpatrick and Lockhart in Pittsburgh.
Megan Carpenter:
And I wanted to do immigration, international business transactions, focus in that area. And as a junior associate, we had a system where there would be, you were in a rotation program where you experienced different areas of practice throughout your first year. And at one point a trademark issue came up and I went ahead and just took it. I knew not one thing about IP. I had not taken an intellectual property class in law school, and I absolutely fell in love with it. My friends have always, I have a lot of friends who are musicians and artists. And I did a lot of college radio work throughout college, and creative communities have been always something that had been very important to me. And I remember one of my close friends was starting a music label and we went out, I'm working in big law and she's starting a music label.
Megan Carpenter:
And we went out to have a drink together. And I was trying to help her get the record label started. And we were kind of comparing notes about how we could help the music community that we loved from different parts of the industry. And so I just fell in love with the idea of legal frameworks, that underpin human creativity, what people come up with, our very humanity and how we kind of structure the legal rights surrounding those things. Apportion rights among certain communities and deny rights to other communities. That was something that was absolutely fascinating to me. And it happened at a time when the dot com explosion, sort of at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s. I started doing a lot of my work with one of our primary clients, which was a client in professional wrestling.
Megan Carpenter:
They were one of the largest multimedia and entertainment companies in the world at the time. And they were starting a lot of new intellectual property branches of their company. They started a music label, they started a football league. We started thinking about all kinds of components because professional wrestling is at base, all based in IP.
A. J. Kierstead:
It's all branding.
Megan Carpenter:
Yeah, it is. And thinking about a professional wrestler, making a special move, if you're doing the people's elbow, is that a trademark really? And so we really pushed the envelope. And when the very first domain name cases came out, when the UDRP came up, we filed the first case in the world at my firm on the UDRP. And so I loved the idea of pushing the envelope in IP law. And I felt like it was so connected to creativity. It was something that was really satisfying to me.
A. J. Kierstead:
So how did that lead you from going from working in a firm to going back into academia? What kind of drove you to want to go back into that space?
Megan Carpenter:
I was teaching Spanish before I went to law school. I felt like as much as I had learned in the classroom, I didn't feel like I really had a great grasp. And what I had learned, I think then, and remains true to date is that there's no better way to learn something than to teach it, because students will always come up with the questions you never thought of. And so I absolutely loved teaching. It was one of those things that when you do it in your soul, you feel like this is right for me. So, and I also loved law school, so I always wanted to teach eventually. And so everything kind of came together when I ended up leaving the law firm to get an LLM in international human rights. And that may seem really strange compared to my practice at the time.
Megan Carpenter:
But what I realized was that intellectually, I fell in love with intellectual property law, and I loved what I was doing every single day. You know, I was spending the majority of my waking hours every day, helping organizations that maybe I didn't really believe in so much. And wouldn't really let my kid watch professional wrestling. So I thought, what are the human rights implications of IP law? You know, what about traditional knowledge? What about other types of communities?
Megan Carpenter:
What about the universal declaration of human rights that states that each individual should have rights over the moral and material interests over their own creations. And I found, I knew I wanted to get an LLM and advance my academic career. And so I found this very well-respected human rights Institute in Ireland and quit my job and sold my home and moved to Ireland to study human rights.
Megan Carpenter:
And I remember my first paper I wrote there, we had to write on one human right. And so I wrote all about the right to intellectual property, and when I got my grade, and I did okay, not so well. And I went to talk to the teacher about it, and she said, "Your paper was really good, but the problem is that's not a very important right". And so that I have always thought back to because that was kind of, it was the early 2000s, sort of before we've recognized that this truly is, we live entirely in intellectual property and content knowledge economy now around the world. So that the irony of that kind of strikes me now.
A. J. Kierstead:
I literally have made my whole career out of doing that, so, working with new media and stuff. That's very much the millennial generation. I mean, a majority of our careers are based around that industry.
Megan Carpenter:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And in different countries, as we think about, there's also an increasing globalization of human rights and intellectual property rights that we need to be thinking about, how those rights are apportioned, not just among certain groups within the US, but around the world.
A. J. Kierstead:
So that led you into teaching at West Virginia again.
Megan Carpenter:
So I came back and I started an intellectual property clinic experience. So uniting again, that kind of experiential learning in IP, and I taught in IP and in human rights there. And I was a visiting professor kind of building my academic portfolio, and publishing as much as possible before I got that first tenure track job. And my first tenure track job was then at Texas Wesleyan in Fort worth, Texas.
A. J. Kierstead:
Both Texas Wesleyan, and Texas A and M, you didn't go that far, but very much in the realm of intellectual property. I mean, what do you feel like some of your highlights in your career were during this time?
Megan Carpenter:
I started the IP program at Texas Wesleyan, and then again at Texas A and M. I remember when I first started, people kept thinking it was IT not IP. So I spent a lot of time saying "not IT, IP". And as a result, I think for the first six years, I had new preps, at least one every year, but often more than that, as I built out the program and then we brought in additional professors.
Megan Carpenter:
So when I left Texas A and M, the program that I had founded, the center for law and intellectual property there, we had just brought on our eighth professor in that field. And so it had become quite a robust program with three different clinics to support the IP program as well. I thought when I first moved to Texas, that I was on the three to five-year program. I couldn't imagine being in Texas for very long. And when I got there, I fell in love with it. I thought Texas, it has such a unique identity. And I love places that have a strong identity. I mean, Ireland was certainly that way. And New Hampshire is really that way, we don't talk about it.
A. J. Kierstead:
No, not here at all. It's no live free or die every five minutes when you you're [inaudible 00:16:00] government, things around here.
Megan Carpenter:
But I love that. I mean, places that are not homogenous, but just have something that makes them special. And so I fell in love with Texas in that way. And a part of my heart always will be there.
A. J. Kierstead:
Now what led you to want to transition from working in clinical education situations, hands-on with students and things like that, to move on, to wanting to become a Dean at, I don't know, University of New Hampshire.
Megan Carpenter:
I found myself increasingly as I was growing the program in IP at Texas A and M, I found myself increasingly doing more and more administrative work because I was sort of a doctrinal professor, and also building a clinical experiential program at the same time. And for me, Franklin Pierce had always been the gold standard, whether I was in practice at Cato Gates or engaging with other academics. Anytime you met a lawyer that had gone to Franklin Pierce, they just, it just sort of comes out very quickly, it's as part of their identity. And so, as I built programs at different schools at West Virginia or Texas Wesleyan, or A and M, for me, I thought, how do I do that? I mean, what is that magic thing that that school has up in New Hampshire, where they are...
Megan Carpenter:
They just produce top quality grads who always keep the school as part of their identity. I mean, I love where I went to law school, but I certainly don't consider it to be part of my ongoing legal identity. And so the opportunity to keep doing administrative work that I loved, even in a greater sense, at a school that for me had always been the gold standard for legal education was just an opportunity that I couldn't pass up.
Megan Carpenter:
And I think as a Dean, you have a unique chance to help build vision. So if there are faculty that want to accomplish something, they have a creative idea. You know, Mike McCann comes up with a unique idea in sports law and wants to create a certificate program, then I can help make that happen. And so I feel like being a Dean, in so many ways through shared governance, I can help people accomplish their goals. And that is something that is incredibly satisfying to me
A. J. Kierstead:
Going off of that, I mean, one of your largest accomplishments here at the law school is the hybrid JD program, which seems like it kind of follows your path, wanting to bring more and more people into education's a prime example of it. I mean, how far back were you beginning to think about something like this and how does it make you feel seeing it come to fruition?
Megan Carpenter:
I am so proud of the work that we've done to create the hybrid program. And I knew when we came in that we had an opportunity to do something innovative, that it was time for the school to figure out what the strategic direction would be in our next phase. And so we engaged in brainstorming sessions, facilitated focus groups, surveys, and really helped kind of crowdsource ideas for our innovation strategy.
Megan Carpenter:
And then we did some market research around around that. And I believe that what we've done in the hybrid program does provide a great foundation for the future of legal education, especially during the pandemic and then post pandemic, where there are some things that online learning is just phenomenal for. And then there are other things that happen best when we get together. But I think we're going to increasingly see a blurred line between online legal education. It's not like this program is distance learning and this program is face-to-face. I think we're going to see those lines, those barriers be far reduced post pandemic, and the hybrid program can be a model for what we do going forward.
A. J. Kierstead:
Hopefully you're not leaving us anytime soon, but what does it look like in the future for you do you think, I mean, is it continuing in this work in academia? Is it focusing more back in intellectual property? Do you have any insight into what you think the future might hold?
Megan Carpenter:
Oh my gosh, I haven't even thought about that, mostly I'm just sort of getting to the end of each day. But I love what we are doing right now. I also love the component of diversity that we've been able to bring to the law school, through the hybrid program. The program makes a legal education accessible, and a top legal education, not your kind of lowest common denominator part-time program at your local college, but a top legal education available to working professionals all across the country and potentially around the world, no matter what their background is.
Megan Carpenter:
And it helps reduce debt. So, law school can be very expensive, but if people also have to quit their full-time job and move their family to New Hampshire to do it, that's kind of a double whammy. So we've seen with the hybrid program, we've been able to significantly increase kind of access to legal education and diversity through the program as well.
Megan Carpenter:
So that's something that I'm very proud of. I think we'll continue to improve the hybrid program. And I think we will grow and continue to be a leader in that space. I'm looking forward to expanding, to allow international students into the program with increased globalization and IP. I also think that we can do more things like the Silicon Valley program that we had last year, where we took students out to Silicon Valley for a learning experience, where they studied both in the classroom, and then they met with the leaders and heads of IP, of companies like Apple and Samsung and Microsoft, Dolby, Uber, Lenovo, I could go on and on.
Megan Carpenter:
But the students are really developing their legal networks and their connections, both in a kind of experiential on the ground way and relating that back to the classroom as well. So I think legal education has an incredible opportunity to change right now. And I look forward to being here at the law school too, to see that through.
A. J. Kierstead:
Thanks for listening to Inside Law Admissions presented by UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law. Be sure to subscribe to The Legal Impact. UNH Franklin Pierce's weekly podcasts on your favorite podcast platform, including Apple, Google, and Spotify.
