INTA INTERVIEW
“I
generally get up at 4am and work on email for two or three hours before I begin my day. And you know, I’ve set my alarm at
3am and you have communications calls and then go back to sleep. You do those kinds of things; you make the necessary adjustments that you have to.” Meet J. Scott Evans, who in January was named as the 2015 president of the International Trademark Association (INTA), replacing Mei-lan Stark. If one thing is for sure, he is taking this role seriously. Evans, whose day job is associate general
counsel at soſtware company Adobe Systems, tells WIPR he wants to take INTA to the next level, an aim that will require implementing change at the organisation “INTA has been growing since I first
became a member in 1994, and it has become increasingly more international. We really want to go to the next level and if we’re going to be a premier world class international organisation, that’s going to require a lot of change. “I
don’t think the tactics and the
methodologies we used to get us to the point we are today are the same that are going to get us to the next level. “So that will require a lot of change in how we think and do things. People in general
are resistant to change and I think lawyers particularly can be resistant to change. What we don’t do is give our leadership any training on how to lead through change and how to identify people who are resistant,” he explains. Te skills he wants people to hone include
running meetings and setting agendas, as “we have not really focused on those kind of skills”, and he hopes they can be a focus of INTA’s leadership meeting, held every November. Tis year, Evans adds, he will create his own
task force on “association governance” and says it’s time for INTA to take a “hard look” at its by-laws and policies. “We’re going to make sure that what we’re
doing today—the practice and procedures we have—actually fall in line with those by-laws, that we’re not missing something and whether those by-laws are still necessarily relevant. “I’m putting together a task force that
includes our counsel, some former counsel that have served us, some former presidents, and some members, and we’ll put that together and hopefully by the November meeting they will provide us with a report and an implementation plan that we can use going forward. “I can’t guarantee that
there will be any
changes recommended, but we’re going to look at things such as should the presidency be a multi-year term. A lot of presidents feel
www.worldipreview.com
World Intellectual Property Review May/June 2015
45
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