What do we actually do all day?

One of the really engaging aspects of the job is that you actively utilise both your scientific knowledge and your analytical reasoning every day. The actual tasks that you will undertake as a Trainee, and once you become qualified, vary tremendously but they tend to call on a similar set of skills.

Analysis

Large portions of our time are spent on analysing technical documents. This may be information from a client about a new invention, earlier patent documents or academic articles sent to us by a patent office, or arguments from a patent office Examiner or another Attorney in patent opposition proceedings. You will often find that you are not drawing on pre-existing knowledge about the technology; rather the ability to rapidly understand new science and interpret it to provide some practical advice is usually more important. This type of analysis requires a lot of careful, thorough reading of technical documents and assessment of both the key concepts and the precise technical detail.

Writing

Most of our work output to both our clients and to patent offices is some form of writing. It may be a formal letter, an opinion about a legal or technical issue, a quick email, or a new patent application; but each requires careful, precise writing. The job involves taking care about the way you use written language to ensure that it conveys the exact intended meaning. You will often find that Patent Attorneys enjoy this detailed understanding of written language, even to the extent that being labelled as pedantic is taken as a compliment!

Strategy

In addition to the analytical aspects of the job, another important skill that is required in our work is the ability to look at a client’s position as a whole and develop a strategy that covers all of their intellectual property. Many clients have a number of patent applications that cover different inventions or different parts of a product and an important part of our job is working out how these interact with each other to give the client the best possible protection. Although we concentrate on a client’s patent portfolio, we also need to keep in mind that they may also be able to get other intellectual property protection (such as trade marks or industrial designs) to help to protect other aspects of any given product. In many cases we act as intellectual property advisors rather than just focusing on a single patent application in isolation.