This month a colleague passed on to me an e-mail from Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors, Inc. (PIIPA), a nonprofit group that recruits IP professionals worldwide who are willing to provide pro bono advice and representation to public interest organizations, mostly in the developing world. (PIIPA was founded in 2002 by Michael Gollin, an IP partner at Venable in Washington.) The e-mail was a call for volunteers to handle a few specific matters, and I found it fascinating reading. An agricultural research scientist who had developed a novel variety of sweet potato in Peru (also suitable for cultivation in Africa) was looking for advice on IP protection and how to avoid infringement problems. A shaman-healer from the Colombian Amazon, who had let a U.S. university anthropologist tape his sacred chants in the 1970s and 1980s, had now discovered that the recordings were being sold without his permission. A volunteer was needed to attend a conference in October in Cairo sponsored by The Arab Industrial and Mining Organization. The theme: the importance of the protection of IP in Arab handicrafts.

Pro bono legal work was already on my mind because it was the theme of the July issue of The American Lawyer, our bigger sibling publication. Every year TAL tallies pro bono efforts and weighs them along with revenue per lawyer, associate satisfaction, and diversity to rank an elite group of 20 firms called The A-List.

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