Alan Durham is a law graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an associate editor of the California Law Review. His undergraduate degree, cum laude, is from Pomona College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. For nearly ten years, Vice Dean Durham was in private practice in Palo Alto, California with the law firms of Brown & Bain and Morrison & Foerster. His law practice emphasized high-technology intellectual property litigation, especially relating to patents and trade secrets. He is also the author of Patent Law Essentials: A Concise Guide. Vice Dean Durham was appointed to the Alabama faculty in 1998 and was named Judge Robert S. Vance Professor of Law in 2010. He teaches Patent Law, Copyright Law, and Trademarks and Unfair Competition.