My name is Tyler Baylis and I am currently in my second full month of 1L year at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law. I intend to specialize in patent law. I took a year off between graduating with a biology major from Umass Amherst in 2019 and starting law school to do construction. I decided to study patent law because it allows me to retain and utilize my undergrad degree while not having to spend my life working in a lab. The field of law is more flexible and allows me to be creative to achieve the results I need. While I did take a couple of law classes in undergrad, I really had no law experience going into law school. Coming into my 1L year, I had a precognitive expectation of what law school entails.
With a heavy focus on biology throughout my academic life, I had done a fair share of scientific reading in my time. I was sure that if I could understand complicated topics like the necessary maintenance of harmful recessive mutations in a gene pool (such as sickle cell anemia) from reading, I would be able to understand legal reading. Unfortunately for me, scientific reading, even at the highest level, was not enough to prepare me for law school reading. Scientific reading is relatively easy for me; you can get away with reading the topic sentences, the bolded texts, and the diagrams provided to distill the topic’s underlying theme. Legal reading, however, is different. In most classes, we read cases which deal with the legal principle the professor wishes to discuss. Not only do you need to understand the facts of the case, but you need to ascertain the key points relevant to the legal principle being discussed. As opposed to scientific reading in which you can decipher at a rather quick glance, legal reading is far more intensive, and each page demands a high level of attentiveness. Needless to say, my expectation that law school was a lot of work appears to be accurate. Additionally, I expected law school to take the same approach as the course load of my undergrad did; for example, I would start out taking the equivalent of general education to get my legal footing. I then would start to focus on patents by my second year. To my surprise, however, I was able to learn a bit about patents as soon as the start of the semester. We have a class that teaches legal research, and how to navigate the legal research databases, both tailored to IP. Patent students learn to research through patent related topics, trademark, and soft IP students learn via researching trademarks and etc. This not only gave me a basic introduction to the patent world, which I did not expect to get, but it also introduced me to my fellow patent law students, who I will spend the next few years learning with and potentially working with after. I am far from an IP expert after only two months of my patent tailored research class, but I am more experienced and exposed to the fundamental patent law concepts and terms than I thought I would be after only a few months into law school. A discussion of my first few months of law school in 2020 would be incomplete without discussing the viral elephant in the room. I initially toured and applied to UNH Law in 2019, so my expectations about the day-to-day law school life were a little different from the reality of school in a pandemic-ridden world. I was excited to be on campus, meet new people, and get engaged in the patent community via luncheons, guest speakers, and other patent related events. However, Covid-19 has checked those expectations. One of the big draws to UNH Law for me was the IP program. When combined with the small class size and diverse, talented IP groups, our nationally ranked IP program seems like the perfect way for any prospective IP student to both network for the future and gain the necessary skills to do the work in the present. While the classes teaching us IP topics has not changed, our access to peers has. Unfortunately, it’s harder to get to know a square on a Zoom call than it is a person sitting next to you in class. Except for my fellow patent students in my research class, it took me a long time to view the other “boxes” on Zoom as my classmates. Even now, there are some students whom I do not share any classes with, and likely would not even recognize their name since we have fewer opportunities to meet. That makes things like student organizations, for example, the PLF for patent students and SIPLA for general IP students, essential as they not only introduce you to people, but they introduce you to the right people who share the same interests as you.
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