IP transactions: a possible Masters course

The IPKat has his own ideas about Masters
(nb Master Cat mousepad available here)

The IPKat's friend, fellow blogger, author and former student Mark Anderson mentioned to him earlier this year that he was very keen to develop a Masters (LLM) programme, which could provide an attractive alternative to the Intellectual Property Diploma course, now hosted at Oxford. The Oxford course is very popular -- but it is heavily focused on IP litigation, whereas Mark would like to see a course, whether an entire LLM programme or just a module of an existing programme, for IP transactions.

The IPKat suggested to Mark that he sketch out a syllabus so that it could be posted on this weblog together with an invitation to readers to make critically constructive comments and/or give an idea as to whether this would be the sort of thing they'd like to do themselves or send a colleague on. Mark has done this: his suggested syllabus can be read here.

You can post comments on Mark's proposed syllabus below, if you want to share them with other readers or induce them to respond -- or you can email them to Mark directly here, with the subject line "IP Syllabus".  It would be helpful to receive comments by Friday 19 August, which gives you a month to get your thoughts together!

For what it's worth, this Kat is convinced that IP lawyers can't get enough education on transactional skills. The pages of this weblog are littered with reports on cases arising from the wreck of badly drafted contracts. Merpel adds: some litigation lawyers seem to think they're immune from needing to know anything about transactions, but isn't that why so many settlement agreements seem to come unstuck? She's glad Mark's syllabus will address this dire area of practice.