CBLDF’s Dale Cendali Celebrated by Law360

indexWe may know Dale Cendali as the mild-mannered, no-nonsense CBLDF Board of Directors secretary, but we should never forget she is a nationally recognized leader in the field of intellectual property. Recently, Law360 celebrated Dale, naming her one of the most influential women in IP law.

You can read the profile that Ryan Davis wrote for Law360 here (subscription required). In more than 20 years of practice, Dale has played the key role in several landmark IP cases. She stopped an unauthorized Harry Potter encyclopedia, won copyright infringement cases for The Associated Press, and represented Victoria’s Secret and Oracle in high-profile trademark and copyright cases. Her work has led to the revision of federal statutes.

Cendali is also committed to teaching and diversifying the legal profession. Davis writes:

Cendali said her advice for young associates is that a legal career is “a marathon, not a sprint,” and that they should set short-term goals, such as writing articles and working with bar associations, that will add to their resume to make clients want to hire them and partners want to staff them on cases.

“You have to do more than a good job when you’ve been assigned; you have to go beyond that with energy and commitment,” she said.

Dale brings plenty of energy and commitment to her work with CBLDF. When she is not trying cases, Dale is an avid comic book collector and fan and has been since she was five years old. She is a big believer in comics as an artform and is deeply committed to the arts, which led to her involvement with CBLDF.

Cendali recognizes that IP law and creative expression are closely related:

“If we don’t create an incentive for people to write Harry Potter books or create vast photo archives like The Associated Press or spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create something as complex as Java, there won’t be original work for others to get to use.”

Read the rest of Dale’s Law360 profile here. Congratulations to Dale for this much-deserved recognition!