Greetings and welcome to Skilled in the Art. I'm Law.com IP reporter Scott Graham. On a brief trip to San Francisco last week I had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with Marilyn Hall Patel, the former chief judge of the Northern District of California, and her former law clerk Kassie Helm, now an IP life sciences partner at Dechert in New York. We discussed the state of women in IP law, including Judge Patel's pioneering practice of encouraging senior partners to entrust their junior partners and associates with more featured roles in the courtroom. Below are excerpts of our conversation. Plus, I've got a quick look at copyright lawsuits filed Thursday that accuse Google and Amazon of turning a blind eye to brazen music piracy, and a recap of Cooley's six-years-in-the-making patent victory for Nintendo of America.

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Retired U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, left, and Dechert partner Kassie Helm.

How Judge Patel Kicked Off a Youth Movement

Kassie Helm: You had the practice in your court, which now has become a little more formalized, you were one of the pioneers of it, of having incentives for more junior lawyers, either women or diverse attorneys, or people who might not get the opportunity …

Patel: I never made it one of my local rules, but—it was very funny one time when we were trying a case, the woman on the team—it wasn't a patent case—but I could see she was kicking her senior partner, who wasn't jumping up and doing whatever he should have been doing. And so finally I just said, you know, why don't you let her proceed with it? She seems to know the case pretty well.