This is part of a series of book reviews by Mayer Brown chair Jon Van Gorp, whose reading informs his perspective as a lawyer and leader of a global law firm and helps him draw insight from unexpected sources.
If you ever get the feeling that new discoveries and inventions are happening at a record pace, maybe that’s because they are. Patent activity is one way to measure this acceleration. In its first century of operation, the US Patent Office issued around 390,000 patents. Now, that’s roughly equal to the number of patents that are issued in just one year. Even the legal industry has participated in the push to explore new frontiers of discovery and innovation.
