Marina Portnova, Partner

9:15 -- Arrive at work. I check my calendar and emails. Fortunately, the emails are minor issues. I check my voicemail and return a phone call to an associate requesting information on common applications. I also telephone a client who wants to talk about opinion letters that I need to prepare for them. We agreed to have a teleconference with their engineers and in-house attorney at 1:00 p.m.this afternoon. I ask the partner who gave me this assignment whether he wants to participate in the teleconference, but he has a meeting at that time. I grab my morning tea and ask Michelle (my secretary) to set up a teleconference at 1:00 p.m. I check with Michelle for any news or updates and I review docket items that are coming due. We discuss two Amendments that are due today.

9:30 -- I prepare for my off-site disclosure meeting and leave for the meeting. The inventors are friendly and informative. The technology is new to me - use of optical lithography in the manufacture of integrated circuits. But the invention seems to be straightforward and I anticipate little problems at this point.

11:45 -- I return to the office and begin preparing for the teleconference. I already read the two patents that our client has been accused of infringing. I review the claims again, and prepare a list of questions that I need to discuss with the engineers at the teleconference. The claims in both patents seem to be very broad in scope, which means that the preparation of the opinion letters may require a lot of work.

12:45 -- I receive a call from an Examiner requesting that our office fax the Issue Fee Transmittal that we sent him a month ago. (It's a shock to find out that the Patent and Trademark Office has misplaced the correspondence). I pass this task on to my secretary.

12:55 -- An associate from our office calls me to ask if I already had lunch. I ask her to wait until my teleconference is over. We agree to have a late lunch at 2:00 p.m.

1:00 -- At the teleconference, the engineers explain to me how their products work and how they differ from the technology described in the patents at issue. Some of the products are complex and we would need to talk about them again in more detail. They have some documentation explaining the functionality of their products. We schedule a follow-up teleconference for tomorrow afternoon to discuss any questions I may have after reading this documentation. They want me to prepare the description of their products by end of this week so that they can review it over the weekend.

3:00 -- I'm back from lunch. Check my emails again. Nothing major, except an email from the inventors with their comments on a draft for a patent application on the Virtual Machine technology. The patent application must be filed tomorrow because the client intends to publicly discuss this invention at a conference. I change the draft according to the inventors' comments. The revised draft is out of the way. Usually there are only minor changes from here on out.

4:30 -- The Partner who gave me the opinion letter assignment is back from his meeting and I tell him about the teleconference. We discuss the claims in the patents and I suggest some arguments for the opinion letters. He agrees with some of the arguments but the others don't seem strong enough to him. We decide to discuss the arguments again next week, after the description of the client's product is finalized.

5:15 -- My secretary has prepared filings for the amendments and they are sitting on my desk. I review the ammendments, sign the filing papers and now they are ready to go out the door.

5:35 -- One of the law clerks pops his head into my office. He needs clarification on responding to an Office Action. We discuss the pending claims, the cited references and the Examiner's rejections. He is up to speed on the technology and leaves to continue the Amendment.

6:00 -- I receive an email from the inventors on the patent application that needs to be filed tomorrow. They don't have any more comments. I forward this email to my secretary and ask her to prepare the patent application for filing. We will file it tomorrow. I receive an email from a different client. His patent application (pertaining to the graphical user interface technology) must be filed in two weeks and he informs me that he is going out of the country in a week. I started working on this application a few days ago but wasn't able to make much progress on it because of more urgent matters. I close the door to my office, pull the file and begin drafting claims for this patent application.

7:00 -- I head home to spend time with my family.

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