Acknowledgments

• Author: Ronald D. Slusky
• Pages: xvii-xviii

xvii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An author’s acknowledgments typically express his appreciation to those

who made it possible for him to pull his book together—mentors, col-

leagues, and friends who read and critiqued the chapters as they were

written; editors; and others involved in producing the published work.

I, too, have such people to acknowledge. But first, thanks to those who

were deserving of acknowledgment long before this book was even a

gleam in its author’s eye.

I owe my biggest debt of gratitude to my employer of 31 years, Bell

Laboratories. It was Bell Labs—originally a division of AT&T and now of

Lucent Technologies—that accepted me into its patent training program

in 1970 and launched my career as a patent lawyer. The Bell Labs legal

organization afforded me the opportunity to learn the patent craft in an

environment that emphasized excellence in all aspects.

Don Snedeker was my first mentor. Don showed me how to write

a structured patent application—one that uses consistent terminology

to tell the invention story in a logical sequence and leave no doubt as

to what the inventive concept is. And Don’s clear, direct writing style

served as a model that I still struggle to emulate.

My across-the-hall neighbor in those early Bell Labs years was Roy

Lipton—an attorney’s son who became an attorney’s attorney. I can see

him still, chair canted back on two legs against my office wall, one hand

hooked under the seat, the other, outstretched, holding a yellow legal-

size sheet containing a freshly typed claim proffered for comment by a

neophyte yearning to be just like him. Roy’s greatest gift to me was his

jurisprudentially focused approach to patent prosecution. “Jurispruden-

tially speaking” has become a favorite expression of mine that a former

colleague has said that he misses hearing me say. I know the feeling.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think back wistfully to the innumerable

“jurisprudentially speaking” discussions I had with Roy.

My later career was nurtured by AT&T’s Patent Counsel, John

McDonnell. The idea of defining the invention in a single sentence—

the problem-solution statement that informs so much of this book—was

something I learned from John. And it was he who entrusted me with