Professional Activities
September 14, 2018
Fitch Even partner Amanda Lowerre O’Donnell will be a featured presenter during five sessions of the Practising Law Institute’s Advanced Patent Prosecution Workshop 2018: Claim Drafting & Amendment Writing, taking place on September 27–28, 2018, at the University of Chicago Gleacher Center. The program is designed for corporate practitioners or outside counsel with patent experience who seek to improve their patent preparation and prosecution skills, including claim drafting and amendment writing, conducting examiner interviews, and drafting effective office action responses.
On September 27, Amanda will be one of three instructors facilitating an interactive workshop on Advanced Claim Drafting related to the electromechanical field. During this session, attendees will receive individualized feedback from the faculty on claim-drafting exercises.
On September 28, Amanda will present a session on Advanced Patent Prosecution Issues, covering topics specific to the electromechanical arts, including the use of means-plus-function claims, how to decide whether and when to amend or not amend claims, and how to structure patentability arguments to gain allowance while minimizing estoppel.
Later that day, Amanda will co-facilitate an interactive workshop on “Advanced Amendment Drafting,” guiding participants as they draft amendments and apply substantive patent law to practical patent prosecution problems. Afterward, she will be among the faculty presenting a session on Examiner Interviews, during which they will discuss the legal requirements for examiner interviews. They will also perform a hypothetical interview, critique it, and provide strategies for achieving a productive examiner interview.
In the closing session of the conference, Amanda will participate in a roundtable discussion of USPTO trends and available resources across all technology areas and will provide tips and recommend strategies for effectively prosecuting applications in view of these trends.
For more information on the workshop, please visit the PLI website.
This is the fifth consecutive year that Amanda has served on the faculty of this annual PLI patent prosecution workshop. Amanda focuses her practice primarily on patent prosecution, patent licensing, and commercial clearance assessments. She counsels clients in the U.S. and abroad working in a variety of technical fields and product applications, including electronic components, energy and renewable energy applications, food processing, packaging technology, and medical devices. In addition, Amanda regularly advises clients on business method protections as well as open-source software issues.
