Lessons Learned from Teaching at Cornell Law School

​I recently concluded my first semester of teaching my course Intellectual Property and Healthcare Technologies at Cornell Law School. This was not my first time teaching the course. In fact, I have taught it six previous semesters at the Harvard School of Public Health. However, in the seven semesters that I have taught the class, I am always amazed by what I learn, both from the course material and from the students. Below are five lessons that I learned from teaching my course this semester.

1. First, there have been lots of new developments in biotech/pharma patent law in the last few years. Since I have previously taught the course, most of my material has already been prepared. However, the last time I taught it was in the Fall of 2015. In the three years since, there have been a lot of new cases especially in 35 USC 101 - patentable subject matter, biosimilar developments, and biopharmaceutical antitrust litigation, among others. Because of these developments, I found that many of my PowerPoint slides needed to be updated. I am happy to be working in a field that is constantly evolving and constantly providing opportunities for continued growth and learning.  
2. Second, I learned a lot of new subject matter. Since the semester was longer at Cornell Law, 14 weeks compared to 8 weeks at Harvard, I had the opportunity to expand my course and incorporate additional topics that I previously did not discuss. These included a bigger focus on antitrust litigation and even a class dedicated to drug pricing. While I taught part of the antitrust lectures myself, I also invited guest lecturers, experts in antitrust and drug pricing, to participate. Not only did the students learn more and have an opportunity to interact with experts in the fields, but I did as well. In a field as diverse as biotech and pharma, learning about other areas that impact our clients is important.
3. Third, issues impacting biotech and pharma companies are constantly in the news. I never truly appreciated how prevalent such issues are in the media but I found myself starting each class with a “news update” where I would share a news article with the students that had something to do with patents. Examples of such news updates included discussions surrounding the growth of cannabis companies and their IP, the October 2018 launch of Humira biosimilars in Europe and settlement agreements in the US, the FDA’s goals of encouraging more generic and biosimilar competition, the Trump administration’s push towards reducing drug prices, and even the trade war between the US and China. I found that being able to tie the class materials to events happening in real time provided more perspective for the students and allowed them to learn the material in context of world events. I will have to continue to use a “news update” in future classes.
4. Fourth, there are a lot of different topics to research and write about. My class was a writing course where students had to write a paper for their final. I was expecting to find students gravitate towards certain “hot” topics, like patentable subject matter under 35 USC 101, the tensions between innovators and generics/biosimilars, or patent reform. Instead, I found that each student found a completely different topic that interested them. As a result, I ended up with sixteen different topics to read about, many of which I would not have come up with on my own. There were also plenty of topics that the students did not write about. This just emphasizes how many interesting issues currently affect the biotech and pharma industries!  
5. Finally, I learned how important it is to encourage creativity amongst the students when helping them decide on topics to research. This is sort of a follow up to point 4 above because it plays on the fact that there are many different topics spanning the industry. Instead of steering students to write about certain topics that are trending in the industry, I encouraged students to find something that interested them and to tie it to the course. As a result, the students were able to work on papers that interested them, while I got to learn about topics that I would not even think about. For example, one student was passionate about arbitration and wanted to work on a paper that discussed the role of arbitration in disputes between biopharma companies. While I have negotiated plenty of arbitration clauses in transactional agreements, I have never before seen anyone take such a deep dive into arbitration agreements and how they ought to be utilized. Other examples of topics included a look at reforming exclusivities (e.g., pediatric and orphan exclusivities) across countries, IP issues in the Theranos case, and an examination of various patent practices and market entry for drugs in different countries such as China, India, Brazil, and Japan. With all the different possible topics in the field, I found that letting students choose something that they were passionate about resulted in higher quality papers in the end.

Overall, I really enjoyed teaching my class at Cornell. I hope to take some of the lessons learned from this semester to make the class even more informative and valuable next year.