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For Gerald P. “Jerry” Dodson ’69, entering a courtroom on the first day of a trial is a little like starting a new life. “A trial is like a mini-life in a way,” he says. “It has all the aspects of a life. You find out a lot about yourself and your colleagues and your opposition.”
Dodson, a patent attorney currently working for the firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP in Palo Alto, Calif., has accomplished a great deal in the dozens of mini-lives he’s led in his career.
Currently, Dodson is representing the University of Rochester in a patent dispute against Pharmacia and Pfizer, marketers of Celebrex, an arthritis drug with sales of more than $3 billion a year. The lawsuit claims infringement on a University of Rochester patent concerning COX-2 inhibitors, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as Celebrex that block an enzyme involved in pain and inflammation. Dodson is currently appealing a judge’s decision March 5 (2003) to dismiss the lawsuit. “The decision strikes at the core of basic research,” he says. “It’s the universities who do basic research that identify methods of treatment.”
Dodson won a $200 million settlement for the University of California in a biotechnology patent case against Genentech involving human growth hormone in 1999, after a decade of legal wrangling and a six-week jury trial. Central to the case was a former scientist from the university working for Genentech, who testified that he returned to his former university laboratory on New Year’s Eve 1978 and removed vials containing cloned chunks of the human growth hormone gene. While Genentech denied that it used the stolen material in its products, the jury voted 9-0 that the university’s patent was valid, then split 8-1 on whether Genentech had infringed on the patent.
In September 2001, he won a 12-0 jury verdict for Clorox Corp. over Procter & Gamble in a patent dispute concerning the Brita water treatment pitcher. Dodson needed to convince the jury that the Brita filter’s replacement indicator relied on air pressure, while Procter & Gamble’s Pur filter’s replacement indicator used buoyancy. “I used a champagne bottle,” he says. “The cork pops out because of pressure, but if you throw it into the champagne, it floats because of buoyancy. The other side could never overcome the champagne-bottle analogy.”
In April 2002, Dodson won a 7-0 jury verdict for Silicon Genesis, a Silicon Valley start-up company that manufactures silicon for insulator wafers used in electronic devices. He argued that Silicon Genesis’ manufacturing process was distinct from that of Soitec, the French firm that filed the suit. Again, Dodson found an analogy that jurors could easily understand, pointing out that the 270-degree temperature difference in the two processes is similar to the temperature difference between baking a cake and baking a cracker.
“It’s not a fight just about money,” Dodson says. “I look for combinations of things in cases I work on. For example, in the Rochester case, I think it’s important that people give back to universities that which they have taken. You can’t expect corporations to do the kinds of research that universities do. Academic freedom is really critical.”
Nearly four decades ago, when Dodson arrived at Lafayette from his working-class home in Pittsburgh, the concept of academic freedom—or even a carefully planned career—was foreign to him. “When I came in, I was planning survival,” he says, explaining that he’d received a scholarship based mainly on his football-playing ability, and that was foremost in his mind.
But during the fall of his first year, a hard hit on the football field ruptured one of Dodson’s kidneys and dashed his dreams of football glory. “In hindsight, it was extremely fortuitous,” he says. “It enabled me to think about who I was.”
James Doehler, an English professor, “kind of took me under his wing,” Dodson adds. “He really sparked in me the idea that I could do way more than I thought I could.” Dodson began taking electrical engineering courses, then switched to mechanical engineering “because I was colorblind and couldn’t see the color coding on the electric resistors.”
By his senior year, Dodson had also decided to study law. After earning his B.S. degree, he began a job as a design engineer in Baltimore, and took night classes at University of Maryland School of Law. After receiving his J.D. degree in 1972, he went to work as special assistant county solicitor in Allegheny County, cutting his legal teeth in an environmental cleanup battle with U.S. Steel Corp.
“I was fascinated by the steel-making process,” he says, explaining that his technical background at Lafayette helped him to understand details that baffled other attorneys, and to argue successfully for pollution control.
By 1977, Dodson had earned his LL.M. degree from George Washington University, focusing on environmental law. After that, he served with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Solicitor’s Office and as chief environmental counsel for U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., then chair of the House subcommittee on health and the environment.
Among his duties was preparing a detailed report on the 1984 toxic leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. “At one point, I wanted all the Union Carbide records sent to me,” he says. “They said, ‘we’ll send them, but you’ll never understand them.’”
Dodson set about sifting through the piles of records, and eventually found a memo describing, in technical terms, the possibility of a runaway reaction. “I turned that over to CBS and Dan Rather,” he says. “It meant that what happened in Bhopal could happen here. It was an impetus to change the [toxic emissions reporting] law in the United States.”
Since moving to California in 1988, Dodson has worked for a series of firms as a patent attorney, joining Morrison & Foerster in 1999.
He has built a reputation as an aggressive yet plain-spoken attorney who can take complex, technical ideas and distill them into easy-to-understand analogies. “It’s one of the hardest things to do,” he says. “I’m always sorting through analogies, bringing new ones in and throwing old ones out.”
And the ability to understand the technical details? It all comes back to Lafayette.
“I am extremely grateful to Lafayette for the education I got there in mechanical engineering,” he says. “It was outstanding and proved to be a real ballast to my career. Lafayette, not law school, was clearly the most important educational experience I had.”