It’s often said that everybody hates lawyers – until they need one.
And the very mention of trademark, patent, and copyright law may be enough to make one’s eyes glaze over in dazed confusion.
But Secaucus resident and newly minted attorney Michael Mattaliano, who recently won first prize in a nationwide essay contest, can discuss this type of law with a restrained passion usually reserved for a hobby or favorite pastime.
“I love where I work,” Mattaliano said, “Law never ceases to amaze me.”
Mattaliano, who graduated from the Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center last May, won an essay contest offered by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, better known as ASCAP. For his effort he received $600.
There were 31 other first-place winners across the country and 13 second-place winners.
Although ASCAP is better known for its fight against illegal digital music downloading, it turns out the society also sponsors an annual essay contest on intellectual property law. The annual contest is open to second and third-year law school students whose schools participate in the competition. The contest has been offered for the past 70 years.
The essays that were submitted by the local winners will now be placed in a national competition where young attorneys have the opportunity to win a $3,000 grand prize.
Mattaliano’s winning essay centered on trademark licenses and bankruptcy.
“The area of law that I looked at deals with executory contracts, where two businesses have a contract with one another, and one company leases its trademark to the other one,” Mattaliano said. “My paper looked at the impact bankruptcy has on these types of contracts. The law covers other types of intellectual property, copyrights, and patents, I argued that Congress left a loophole in the law by not including trademarks.”
Perhaps not the sexiest legal topic around, but likely important to corporations concerned about how the soft economy may affect the financial health of other companies they do business with.
ASCAP sponsors the contest to generate interest in copyright law and to encourage law school students to pursue copyright law after they graduate – ironic since Mattaliano now practices, of all things, tax law.