Professor Hugh Hansen was recently named one of the 50 most influential people in IP throughout the world by Managing Intellectual Property magazine.
The list includes judges, CEOs, and law professors, as well as figures from popular culture who have been at the forefront of highly publicized IP disputes, including singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.
Hansen was included in the list for his internationally recognized work in IP law—particularly his role in founding the Fordham IP Conference. The conference, now in its 27th year, has garnered a reputation for its impressive array of panelists from industry, academia, and law firms across the globe, and its position at the cutting edge of issues in IP law. Steven Tepp, an IP expert and professor at George Washington University School of Law called it “the single best international IP conference in the world, hands down,” while the director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva called it “the Davos of the IP world.”
“There has been an explosion of IP law in the U.S. and globally,” Hansen said. With the complications that new technologies bring to the ever-changing world of IP law, parsing its intricacies will necessarily be an ongoing process.
Hansen remains a central figure in this process. Managing IP says, “Hansen’s personality is evident throughout the conference, whether it is turning the tables on a panel of judges by grilling them with pointed questions or aggressively keeping the conference running on time by insisting speakers stop when their time is up, even if they are mid-sentence.”
“Judges are normally never challenged,” Hansen notes. “At the conference they are. A British judge commented that he loved how he had to ‘get on his hind legs and defend his positions’ like he did when he was a barrister.”
The conference has adopted the motto, “Learn. Debate. Have fun.”
“Sometimes we have to be reminded to have fun,” Hansen says. “Here it is easy.”