What is a typical work day like for a Patent Attorney?
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at
10:12 am
megzstar22 asked:
I’m considering going to law school to get into patent law and I want to get a better understand of what a patent attorney does during their work day.
I will have my B.S. in Electrical Engineering.
I’m considering going to law school to get into patent law and I want to get a better understand of what a patent attorney does during their work day.
I will have my B.S. in Electrical Engineering.
Tagged with: Law School • Patent Attorney • Patent Law • Typical Work
Filed under: Attorney FAQ
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I’m not sure there’s a universal answer for a “typical” work day for a patent attorney. A substantial factor is whether you are prosecuting or litigating patents. If you’re prosecuting patents, you will spend most of your time conferencing/meeting with inventors, drafting patent applications, and responding to office actions. Depending on your litigation experience, you may be doing anything from lowly document review to deposing witnesses.
Another significant factor is whether you are working for a large firm or a small boutique. Even for firms that around the same size, the culture of each firm can vary greatly. This can affect the kind of work and the amount of responsibility you have, especially as a junior associate.
Your undergrad education must qualify you to sit for the patent bar exam – e.g. science or engineering degree. a patent attorney is a licensed attorney who has a registration number from the PTO.
A registration number may be received in 2 ways:
1. pass patent bar exam.
2. be a patent examiner at the PTO for > 4 yrs.
Either way you have to have the science background to get into the door. I am only writing all of this b/c of the 130 people i graduated with from law school, I only knew of 4 people (including myself) with the necessary backgrounds to practice before the PTO.
If you intend to practice in the U.S.:
1) Go to Google/Patents (follow the more/even more links starting at the top of the regular Google page).
2) Imagine an invention in your area of technical competency.
3) Search for it using Google patents.
4) Print a few that have issued recently.
5) Read them. !0 -20 percent of your time will be spent drafting such documents.
6) Go Here:
7) Enter in the distorted words to get passed security
8)Enter in the patent number of one of the printed patents, be sure to select the middle selection circle Patent Number, then click search
9) On the next page to be displayed, click on the image file wrapper tab. This will bring up a list of most of the papers that were exchanged between the office and the applicants representative during the “prosecution” of the application.
10) download and review those papers. Reading and writing similar papers is how you will spend 90-80 percent of your time.
My percentages might be off a bit, I left out time for interviewing inventors and speaking with examiners…and if you become a litigator, there can be huge amounts of time doing that…
…by the way, don’t be put off if you don’t understand the Office actions you read in the file wrapper. Most of them are complete gibberish…