Another Legal Conference, another Tylenol, another Story

By Tony Wilson

If you’ve never been to the International Trademark Association Convention (normally called INTA), you’ve missed the opportunity to be bombarded by 8000 fellow trademark professionals meeting each year in a different city to talk about the following five things:

1. The ridiculous crowds;
2. The free promotional swag given out by Exhibitors;
3. Which big name rock band will play the Thomson party;
4. The fine art of crashing law firm receptions you weren’t invited to; and
5. Hangovers.

You might note that the word “Trademark” is not in the top five things spoken about at INTA, but I assure you it is in the top ten. If you hope to get new business at INTA, forget it. Everyone in this business is here, so it’s impossible to find any new contacts unless you booked it well in advance. Because you normally deal with your colleagues by e-mail or on the phone, you don’t necessarily know what they look like. So you don’t look at anyone’s eyes at INTA. You look at their badges while pretending to look at their eyes. It’s an art.

You have to bring lots of business cards to INTA to give to other lawyers, and to put in contest raffles to win things like iPods. And you get lots of cards in return. Last year, I spoke to one of the Exhibitors and he asked me to put my business card in his bowl so that his company might send me spam. Appreciating his honesty, I obligingly pulled a card from one of my pockets and put it in his fish-bowl. At least I thought it was one of mine. Who can say?

A couple of INTA’s ago, I was sitting down in a comfortable chair to collect my e-mails (and my wits) and dozed off for a moment. A lawyer from China woke me up, smiled and gave me his business card. Perhaps he didn’t see that my eyes were closed (which is how we sleep in Canada). A colleague told me he was also offered a business card by one of these “Cardmen,” but in the men’s bathroom. I hoped the card had not been offered while the two were sitting. Or standing.

I surmised there was an organization that didn’t want to pay for an Exhibition Booth at INTA, but hired nameless Cardmen to hang around comfortable chairs and bathrooms to give business cards to the unwary and unwashed. Perhaps their overseers counted the business cards collected each night and the Cardman with the least number got sent back to Beijing.

But the key to enjoying INTA are the law firm receptions. As long as you’re wearing an INTA badge, you can more or less get access to any INTA party at any restaurant or bar in the Host City and be royally treated to free drinks till the cows come home. No-one is turned down, in part because they don’t know you and in part because they want your business card to send you spam. That’s the trade-off. When I leave the law, I think I’ll set up a travel business where I’ll send tourists to INTA and other big conventions around the world. My “agency” would figure out where the best receptions were, give patrons a tie, a badge and some business cards and send them on their merry way to free inebriation and more canapés than they could ever imagine. It’ll be like a cruise ship, but without the seasickness or awkward tipping decisions. I think I’ll call it “Gatecrashers Travel.” I’ll have to trademark that, won’t I?

Tony Wilson is a Franchise, Trademark and Intellectual Property Lawyer at Boughton in Vancouver. He’s written for the Globe and Mail and Macleans magazine. twilson@boughton.ca

This article was published in the June 2007 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2007, all rights reserved.