Down to Earth Advice from a Lofty Diplomatic Perch

Being an American ambassador can be a pretty surreal experience, but it can lead to some real advice for people considering careers in international business law.

Rick Graber, a prominent Milwaukee lawyer and Republican leader, was ambassador to the Czech Republic for the last two and a half years of President George W. Bush’s administration. He described his experiences as ambassador and gave advice during a recent hour with about 25 students in Profossor Irene Calboli’s International Business Transactions course at the Law School.

Graber called the lifestyle of an ambassador unimaginable – a spectacular 60,000-square-foot house and eight to ten people to run the house. “You’d take your shirt off in the evening and, magically, it would be clean in the morning,” he said. “That doesn’t happen much in Shorewood.”

Graber described the two major issues that occupied him during his time in the Czech Republic.

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Supreme Court Takes Jurisdiction Over “Jurisdiction”

copyrightA bit overshadowed by all the hubbub over the oral argument in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court yesterday handed down an important copyright opinion in Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick. (But see Howard Wasserman, Marcia Coyle.) The court held that Section 411(a) of the Copyright Act, which requires registration of a copyright as a prerequisite to an infringement suit, is not “jurisdictional”—that is, failure to file a registration does not deprive a court of all power to hear a claim.

This might not initially sound significant; after all, a plaintiff who files an infringement claim on an unregistered copyright is still going to have the case dismissed, whether Section 411(a) is deemed a mere prerequisite to filing or jurisdictional. But the distinction matters in three types of cases: class actions where unnamed members of the class would include owners of unregistered works (the Muchnick situation); plaintiffs who seek an injunction against further infringement encompassing all of their works, registered and unregistered; and would-be defendants who file for a declaratory judgement against a copyright owner who hasn’t registered yet. All three of those seem like worthy candidates for a court’s consideration as a policy matter, but all three were impeded by a slew of lower court opinions holding that a failure to register deprived the court of all power to even hear such disputes. (Congratulations for the win are due to lawyers from my old firm: Chuck Sims, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, and Jon Baumgarten.)

A bit of background before I continue:

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Don’t Forget the Small Towns

It is a commonly held belief among law students that practicing law in a small town is boring and not sufficiently rewarding from a financial standpoint.

That simply is not true.

A really good lawyer will do well almost any place. If you are not going to strive to be a really good lawyer, you won’t do well any place.

If you go to a small town to practice you will be surprised, if you have patience, just what you will find.

For 43 years I have practiced in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a town of about 45,000. For most of that time the majority of my practice was business law with an emphasis on mergers and acquisitions, but I also did a fair amount of estate planning and real estate. After my first five years of practice, this is all that I did. 

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