Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Fall/Winter 2009 - Online Volume 2
Alumni
CLE Profile: Patrick Oot (LL .M.’05)
Patrick Oot (LL.M. ’05) knows that keeping up with technology can give you an edge. When he was an undergraduate at Syracuse University in the mid-1990s, he took advantage of the newly developing Internet to start his own entertainment marketing business — out of his college apartment in upstate New York.
“Back then, e-mail was something that was unique and not everyone had it,” says Oot, who is now the director of e-discovery and senior counsel at Verizon. “But the majority of college students had e-mail addresses and computers in their dorm rooms, so it was the smartest way to market.” So what did he market to college kids in Syracuse? Concerts, of course. Oot would create a series of events, booking acts like the singer/songwriter Moby and hip-hop group Run DMC; seek sponsorship from various companies and round up an eager audience of twenty-somethings — all by using the Internet. “I was one of the first event producers to have an actual Web site, when there were not programs like Front Page or DreamWeaver to help you,” he says.
Now, as one of the advisory board members of the Advanced E-Discovery Institute, part of Georgetown Law’s Continuing Legal Education program, Oot is helping others stay abreast of the latest developments in electronic discovery. After joining Verizon as senior counsel in 2004, Oot started putting information on the Web regarding ediscovery and was asked by CLE director Larry Center if he’d like to share that knowledge in a continuing legal education context. Oot said yes. “I really enjoy solving new problems,” he says.
At the annual E-Discovery Institute — scheduled for November 12 and 13 at the Capital Hilton, Oot will speak on a panel about the new Federal Rule of Evidence 502, signed into law in 2008. It established a new framework for resolving cases of inadvertent production of privileged documents in connection with electronically stored information, or ESI. He testified before a federal rulemaking committee on this in 2007.
How did Oot go from booking Run DMC concerts in Syracuse to holding court on Federal Rule of Evidence 502? He went to Syracuse for law school, graduated in 2001, moved to Washington, D.C., to work on licensing and trademark issues at a law firm but decided to pursue an LL.M. in tax at Georgetown when “the bottom fell out of the entertainment industry” after 9/11. He switched to Verizon, so to speak, one year before completing his LL.M.
What’s interesting, Oot says, is that in the 1990s, technology was what set his company apart from the rest. And now it’s “these continuing legal education programs and the networking that they provide” that are giving him a new edge.
