Daily Briefs

Brooks Kushman lawyer named president of Michigan Intellectual Property Law Assoc.


Brooks Kushman shareholder Rachel A. Smith has been appointed as Michigan Intellectual Property Law Association (MIPLA) president for the 2018-2019 term.

As president, Smith will be responsible for acting as the official representative of the association. She will provide leadership and strategic vision to the organization to aid in its growth and importance, offer guidance to the organization’s standing committees and preside over all meetings of the membership, as well as the board.

As leader in MIPLA, Smith will oversee programs that promote the organization’s mission and core values such as law school outreach programs and liaisons, community outreach, coordinating networking events, organizing CLE credit luncheons and other on-going educational opportunities for members.

Smith is a registered patent attorney and focuses primarily on domestic and foreign patent prosecution, and has a deep understanding of various technologies in the mechanical and electrical arts.  In particular, she has extensive experience prosecuting patent applications in consumer electronics, automotive, medical device, and network technologies. Her practice further includes drafting patentability, infringement, validity and freedom to operate opinions.

Smith’s practice also includes consulting clients on open source software license agreements. She works with clients to understand complex software licenses and copyright matters, and has worked with the firm’s open source team to perform software audits on complex systems.

 

Witness says Snyder aides were alerted about Legionnaires’
 

FLINT, Mich. (AP) — A member of Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration says the governor’s senior aides were told about a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in the Flint area months before it was publicly announced.
Eric Brown is testifying Monday in the criminal case against Nick Lyon, Michigan’s health director. Brown works for Snyder in Michigan’s Washington office.

He says he was on a conference call about Legionnaires’ in September 2015. He says Lyon warned Snyder’s top advisers that cases were rising at the same time that Flint was using water from the Flint River.
Brown says Snyder’s chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore, was on the call, along with the head of the Department of Environmental Quality and others.

Snyder insists he didn’t learn about the Legionnaires’ outbreak until January 2016.
 

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