In search of justice

CLASS NOTES
ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
1982
Larr Kelly
photolarr@verizon.net
John Shea MSEL’82, of Mackie
Shea, PC, has been selected by his
peers as Best Lawyer for Environmental
Law and Environmental
Litigation. He is included in the 23rd
Edition of The Best Lawyers in America.
1983
Martha Lyons
malyonsesq@hotmail.com
MARK MILLER JD’83
1984
Charles Van Gorder
chase@vglaw.com
1985
alumni@vermontlaw.edu
Please email alumni@vermontlaw.edu if you
are interested in serving as class secretary.
Kevin Bernstein JD’85, an environmental
and energy attorney at
Bond, Schoeneck & King PLLC in
Syracuse, New York, was elected to
chair the firm’s management committee
in November 2015. This year,
he has been recognized in the 2016
Upstate New York Super Lawyers list
in the category of Environmental
Law. Kevin also practices in other
areas such as land use, condemnation,
and real estate.
Fulbright Specialist Dr. Robert Robertson
MSL’85 was appointed as
the first president of The Bahamas
Technical and Vocational Institution
in August of this year.
Years ago a teenaged Mark Miller and his father solved a problem that had been hounding the elder
Miller’s friends in the medical field: how to avoid contamination of blood flowing into the uncovered
top of a device called a manometer, used to measure central venous pressure or, in essence, blood
pressure. The father-son inventing team developed a device to measure blood pressure that wasn’t
open to the air, thereby preventing airborne contamination from infecting the blood. Having grown
up under the guidance of a physicist and inventor father, this endeavor was par for the course for
Mark whose proclivity for science, the mechanics of invention, and his father’s efforts to patent his
inventions, led him to pursue an undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Connecticut.
Mark surprised everyone by not pursuing an advanced degree in physics and instead choosing
to attend law school, which, “at the time, was pretty much unheard of for someone with a science
background.” Choosing a school where he could balance his studies with a passion for skiing, Mark
landed at VLS. He managed to teach skiing and to pursue a musical partnership with classmate
Peter McGee, all the while maintaining his studies. He took Torts with Ralph Bischoff and Contracts
with Grant Gilmore, and fondly recalls his first experience with a true “audio book” when reading
Gilmore’s “The Death of a Contract ”: “It was one of the few times in my life that I read a book, and
heard it in the voice of the author.” Mark pursued a career in intellectual property (“IP”), and upon
graduation, procured a job at an IP boutique in Washington, D.C. He met his future wife in the bar
review study course, and the couple stayed in Washington, D.C., for three years before moving to
San Francisco, where he joined another IP boutique. “It was a classic IP practice, where I handled
all phases of the practice—transactions and litigation. That was the model, IP counsel would do
everything that the client needed in the IP space.” The trend of general practice firms in the mid-
1990s was to either grow organically or swallow up IP boutiques. As the use of patents grew in an
increasingly competitive marketplace, particularly in the chip industry in the Silicon Valley, Mark
realized that to continue litigating he’d have to move to a large firm. In 2002, he joined O’Melveny &
Myers, where he works today.
Mark currently has patent, trade secret, copyright, and trademark cases pending in New York
and California, and several proceedings pending before the Patent and Trademark Office Patent
Trial and Appeal Board and Trademark Trial and Board. He also handles many trademark matters
relating to the selection and clearance of new trademarks and brands. He works in a landscape of
IP law where now “the first to file gets the patent,” and where, as Mark describes, the 2014 U.S. Supreme
Court decision Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International held that–in essence–an invention (idea)
that can be performed with pen and paper is an abstract concept and not patentable. The structure
and operation of cellphones has stabilized, and as Mark described, “Patent litigation around those
devices has settled down, and people are wondering, what is the next new technology?”
Illustration and story by Hannah Morris
41 FALL 2015