New Course Opportunities and New Faculty for Fall 2014

The Fall 2014 course offerings include three new courses, two of them offered by our two extraordinary new faculty members, the third by an alum with deep practice experience in the field:

Entrepreneurship – Professor Patrick Gaughan will offer this interdisciplinary course designed to prepare you to serve entrepreneurial business clients and venture capital supported firms. This training can get you in on the ground floor of the start-up businesses so vital to economic growth. Think Amazon, Google, Apple, and so many others that began in someone’s garage. Those businesses will need you.

Professor Gaughan, is the newly appointed Executive Director of the Innovation Practice Center at the University of Akron. The IPC is part of the major Presidential Achieving Distinction initiative aimed at enhancing the stature of the University of Akron and the economy of this region. Prof. Gaughan has successfully obtained private equity investment in both high-tech and traditional investments.

2.  Cyberlaw – Cyberlaw returns to the curriculum with the arrival of Prof. Jacqueline Lipton as the new Director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Technology. The course will address a wide range of the legal issues posed by continuing developments in cyberspace, including jurisdiction, freedom of expression, trademark, copyright, and associated intellectual property issues, privacy and defamation, and Internet governance.

Prof. Lipton joins us from the University of Houston Law Center, where she was the Baker Botts Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Intellectual Property and Information Law. Before that, she served as Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law, Technology, and the Arts at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

3.  Advertising Law – Adjunct Professor Adam Ekonomon will offer this two-credit course surveying the full range of a subject important to any business that wants to sell its products. An Akron alum, Professor Ekonomon is Director of Marketing, Advertising and Regulatory Law and Assistant General Counsel at The J.M. Smucker Company. With experience like Smuckers, the course has to be good!