Brian Park Quoted in Best Lawyers® National Business Edition Magazine on "Next Big Idea"

Stoel Rives attorney Brian Park was featured in Best Lawyers® national Business Edition  magazine (available in print and online) in a spotlight article called “Lawyer of the Year Honorees,” which recognized the 2016 award recipients in Patent Law and Litigation – Patent.  Park is the recipient in Litigation – Patent for the state of Washington.

Park was asked to respond to the question: “What is one patentable technology, process, or idea that you think has the greatest potential in the next 10 years, and why?”

His response: “Since our species first burned wood for heat, mined coal for electricity, and split the atom for energy, we have been on a quest for better, smaller, and more efficient means to power the fruits of human invention.  I believe that energy storage — specifically, macro- and micro-solutions for harvesting, storing, and delivering energy — is the technology with the greatest potential in the next decade.

“More efficient and accessible energy technology is needed to promote the growth of the renewable energy sector and to fuel advances in existing/emerging technological areas.  Energy enables advancement in the useful arts and across many quickly developing fields (clean tech, computing, medical devices, nanotechnology, robotics, bio-machine interfaces, and consume r products, to name a few).  The consistent impediment to successful innovation and commercialization is the power supply.  Accordingly, energy storage technologies — and their myriad applications —present the greatest potential for patentability.

“Prophetically, Abraham Lincoln*, the only American president to be issued a United States patent, once quipped that the patent system ‘added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.’  Reconciling these elements is one of the most challenging and gratifying aspects of my patent litigation practice, as is working at a firm that is on the cutting edge of helping clients bring energy innovation into the next era, [which] enables vision to be transformed into practice.”

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*The Best Lawyers® editorial staff added details about Lincoln’s patent, as follows:  On May 22, 1849, Abraham Lincoln was granted a patent for an invention involving the use of attachable buoys to lift stranded boats out of shallow water. Lincoln himself was twice stranded on boats that ran aground during his brief stint as a ferryman on the Mississippi River, and, as a young Representative from Illinois, he is said to have begun work on his patent after his boat was marooned on a sandbar on his trip home between sessions of Congress.

Read “Lawyer of the Year Honorees,” published summer 2016 by Best Lawyers®.