Wednesday, November 26, 5:30-7:30 pm
at Algonquin College, Woodroffe Campus just south of Baseline, Building T, Room T119 (campus map below)
The Cutting Edge on Intellectual Property (IP)
IP — What is it? Do you have it? Do you need it? What’s it worth to you, and how do you get it and protect it? What is the current landscape and what are the emerging trends? A panel of experts representing legal, investor, government and IP as business perspectives will address these and other questions and share their experience with intellectual property.
Come hear our distinguished speakers:
Bayo Odutola
Practice Leader, Odutola & Co.
Curtis (Curt) Dodd
VP of Patents and Counsel, Wi-LAN
Dallas Smith
Department Head of the Intellectual Property Group Ottawa, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP
Marie-Andrée Katia Bertrand
Manager Outreach Program, Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO)
Paul Smelters
Partner, VenGrowth Private Equity Partners
Michael Morgan
Head of Licensing Group, LaBarge Weinstein
Bayo Odutola, Odutola & Co.
Bayo Odutola is the practice leader of Odutola & Co., an intellectual property law (IP) boutique in Ottawa. Bayo is an IP lawyer and trade-mark agent. He has represented clients from Juno and Academy Award winners to chemical companies and family pizzerias. He is perhaps best known nationally and internationally as an author of the authoritative loose-leaf manual: Odutola on Canadian Trade-mark Practice, a comprehensive reference work, updated quarterly, published in 2005 by Thomson Carswell.
Bayo is one of the few dual-certified specialists in IP Law (Trade-mark/Copyright) by the Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC) and has served on LSUC’s Committee for the Certification of Specialists in Intellectual Property. He has also taught, written and spoken widely in his area of expertise.
Bayo handles all aspects of IP litigation (opposition, cancellation/expungement proceedings and domain name disputes), prosecution, acquisition, clearance and advice with a particular emphasis on trade-marks, copyright, licensing and technology-related issues.
Curtis (Curt) Dodd, Wi-LAN
As VP of Patents and Counsel, Curt is responsible for the management of Wi-LAN’s Patent portfolio including all patent filing and prosecution-related activities, as well as formulating infringement and validity positions with respect to its issued patents. In addition, he is actively involved in licensing Wi-LAN’s patents and provides patent-related counsel to Wi-LAN’s licensing, research and development, business development and litigation teams.
Prior to joining Wi-LAN, Curt held the position of Intellectual Property Counsel at Nortel Networks. In this position, Curt was involved the management and licensing of Nortel’s 4G wireless technologies including WiMAX. Curt is a patent lawyer, engineer and registered patent agent and has authored several papers on U.S. and Canadian patent law.
Dallas Smith, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP
Dallas Smith is Department Head of the Intellectual Property Group in Ottawa and has expertise in patent prosecution, with an emphasis on originating patent drafting for Canadian high technology, electronics, communications, wireless and photonics companies.
Software patents include client/server application software development tools, communications algorithms, telecommunications services, and speech recognition algorithms.
A Registered Patent Agent in Canada and the United States, he received his honours degree in Physics from the University of Victoria in 1972 and acquired his patent agent certification in 1989 and was awarded the Marie Morency Memorial prize for drafting proficiency.
Prior to joining Gowlings, he spent four years as Director, Intellectual Property with Nortel Networks Corporation, where he worked with various businesses on patent strategy and acquisition. He worked for the firm as a patent agent for two years after he spent six years as a patent manager for Northern Telecom’s Patent Department, where he was responsible for the drafting, filing and prosecution of patents, on a worldwide basis, for transmission systems, optical fibre systems, data and telephone switching networks and services, voice processing and speech recognition. He also advised various corporate departments on validity and infringement issues.
Dallas is a member of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada and was a member of the Patent Agents Examination Board 2004-2007. He conducted tutorials on drafting of patents for IPIC for 10 years. For six years he lectured and tutored a portion of a summer course on patents for the PTIC at McGill University.
Marie-Andrée Katia Bertrand, Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO)
Mrs. Marie-Andrée Katia Bertrand recently joined CIPO as Director of the Outreach program, which is responsible for raising awareness, knowledge and effective use of IP in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and education sectors as well as in other government departments.
Prior to this assignment, Mrs. Bertrand worked for several years with economic development agencies for the government of Canada as a Regional Director in Québec. She has also worked for the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) as a Director, counselling services. In addition, she occupied various positions with international cooperation agencies working with developing countries.
Paul Smelters, VenGrowth Private Equity Partners
Paul Smelters is a Partner at VenGrowth Private Equity Partners, and has more than 25 years of technology experience in advanced technology design, R&D management, and product/business management. He currently specializes in communications and semiconductors, and actively serves on the boards of local technology companies such as BTI Systems, TenXC Wireless, Galazar and Kleer. Prior to joining VenGrowth in 2005, Paul worked in various senior roles at Nortel Networks/BNR. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc Electrical Engineering) from the University of Waterloo, and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Queen’s University.
Michael Morgan, LaBarge Weinstein
Michael Morgan is the head of the LaBarge Weinstein Licensing Group. He practices intellectual property law with an emphasis on complex transactions for the development, acquisition, licensing, use or other exploitation of technology products and services.
Prior to joining LW, Michael was the General Counsel of the Entrust group of companies, where he was responsible for the negotiation and drafting of a wide variety of contracts, including software licenses, distribution and OEM agreements for both hardware and software, software development agreements, maintenance, consulting, source code escrow, and Internet-related agreements. In addition to these responsibilities, Michael managed the Entrust intellectual property portfolio of over 100 patents and pending patent applications, and was also responsible for the management of a number of patent infringement lawsuits for Entrust in the United States. Before to joining Entrust, he was a member of the Technology Law group at Nortel Networks, where he worked on numerous large M&A transactions.
