26 April 2016, 3 pm
Actually, I have thought of something else to do for #WorldIPDay. I have summoned all my experience and compiled the following list of Best Things to Say to Your Clients. I bequeath it, free from encumbrances, for use by IP attorneys the world over, especially the ones in private practice. It is my personal #WorldIPDay gift.
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26 April 2016, 10 am
To mark World IP Day, I spend a couple of hours in quiet contemplation of the wonders of IP, and how blessed we are to have the opportunity to work with it. Then I get up, have breakfast, send some tweets, contemplate IP quietly for a bit longer, and before you know it I am half-way through the day. I noticed that Twitter was positively squawking with #WorldIPDay tweets. Or at least, my little corner of it was. Possibly the shock waves have not yet reached the rest of the world. Possibly #WorldIPDay will not make it onto the national news. That said, Mr Davies has gamely initiated a “Hug a patent or trade mark attorney” campaign, complete with logo and badges. I am not sure if the badges are intended to be worn as a mark of achievement for those who have completed the challenge, or as an indication that the wearer is up for a hug, or indeed desperate for a hug, this being possibly the only day of the year they are likely to get one. Either way, a gauntlet has been thrown. I cannot think of anything celebratory to do doon ’yur in the Wess Curntry. Mr Davies and some of the other officers are going to an IP Day party at the House of Commons, where Mr Davies will no doubt be handing out his badges and hugs. But I find parliamentary parties a bore, darlings, and the idea of being hugged by random strangers, who are only doing it because Mr Davies told them to and promised them a badge, does not appeal. So I have decided not to trek all the way to London just to drink sparkling wine with people who think IP and copyright are the same thing. Since everyone else in the IP world is partying, my email traffic is unusually light. So I think I might throw a party of my own. My children aren’t especially interested in IP, nor is my husband, but they can usually be persuaded to join a party. This one will be almost as good as National Pie Week, and certainly better than International Women’s Day, when I made everyone queue to go to the toilet, so they knew how it felt. 22 April 2016, 11 pm
Dear Diary, You, better than anyone, know how I struggle with the ups and downs. The bright whites and the dark gulleys. The high contrast, super-saturated, amazing technicolour dream world and the flat monochrome wash that sometimes rolls in. You know there are good days, creative and buzzing, when I set up task forces and draft proposals, times when I genuinely believe I could rule the world if given the opportunity, or at least a small chartered institute. And then the bad days, miserable and anxious and so, so tired, when my brain goes over and over the things I’ve been doing and those I haven’t been doing but should have, and denounces them all as hideous failures. Days when the CIPA stationery cupboard seems an attractive place to spend the rest of my life, with the door locked, hoping nobody finds me ever again. You know that on the bad days, Imposter Syndrome doesn’t even start to describe the self-doubt, the conviction that people see me for the weak, incompetent and generally unpleasant person I am. Dear Diary, you’ve been there the nights I couldn’t sleep, battling the mist, certain I wasn’t coping. And the mornings when the alarm hauled me like a zombie onto the station platform, when opening the inbox reduced me to tears, when my body developed life-threatening aches and pains one after the other, as though to heighten the misery of the Zummerzet-to-London commute. You’ve heard me cry myself to sleep in hotel rooms, and drag myself awake in the winter dark. Today has been a low day. Today I have been a rubbish CIPA Pee for the entire twelve months. And I absolutely agree with the folk who denounce me as naïve and delusional, as a lightweight and a discredit to the Institute. Probably by next week I will be the best – or at least the most entertaining – thing to have happened to CIPA Council since it shut up shop in the 1940s to fight a war. But that’s next week; today I have stared at my emails and been unable to think of a single sensible response. Tonight I am worried that I still have all those emails to deal with over the weekend. The fact that other people have been enjoying an Andrea-free Friday weighs heavily on my conscience. My brain won’t stop thinking, but the thoughts are rubbish, unhelpful thoughts that make me feel worse. They keep me awake but they don’t solve any of the problems. Mental illness is little discussed and it is certainly not supposed to incapacitate the CIPA Pee at irregular intervals. But it does. And I have some pretty little pills to take at bedtime to make me happy and not-anxious, and they are very good little pills and I have taken them for a lot of my adult life, so heaven knows what I would be like without them. But even with them, I am little more than a high-functioning nutcase – and that’s the charitable way of putting it. A couple of early starts, some bad journeys and the trauma of living out of a suitcase are all it takes to throw me into despair. One bad-tempered meeting and I am teetering on the edge. It is possible that my CIPA colleagues have already sussed this but been too polite to say. It is also possible that they have absolutely no idea why I set up so many task forces and then get so grumpy about them afterwards. When they find out, they might well say: Ah, that explains a lot then. But equally, I might be denounced as a fraudulent Pee, and The Gold Leaf Man told not to bother writing my name on the Board of Past Presidents after all. Because there is an insanity clause in the Bye-laws, I’m sure of it. Still, in the interests of diversity and inclusivity, dear Diary, I thought it best we came clean. I feel better now. I might even be able to sleep. Though it may be a few days before I’m ready to rule the world again. 22 April 2016, 1 pm
I meet up with some of my old colleagues. Not old old you understand, or even out-of-date old, just it-seems-a-long-time-ago old. They tell me what it is really like at the IP coal face these days. I tell them what it is really like at CIPA. We agree it is no easier being a real patent attorney than an it-seems-a-long-time-ago patent attorney. So we have a cracking good lunch and trade outrageous insults (ie banter) instead. The lunch comes courtesy of a Michelin®-starred gastropub that is so far down the narrow backstreets of Zummerzet I am surprised the Michelin Man got through. I have eaten all manner of off-the-wall dishes here, from celeriac ice cream to pig’s cheek pavlova (OK, so the latter may be a slight exaggeration, but you get the gist). Today I go vegetarian and order something which is essentially twenty ways with carrot. Glazed carrot; puréed carrot. Big carrots; little carrots. Carrot sticks; carrot peelings; carrot tops. Somebody bought too many carrots last week. There is also a boiled egg in breadcrumbs – which is clever, because I often struggle to keep a boiled egg even in its shell – and a pickled walnut. The whole thing is divine. We keep eating strange things until we are all it-seems-a-bit-late-to-go-back-to-the-office patent attorneys. Since it is Friday afternoon, I regard this as a Result. 21 April 2016, 8 pm
Now I am spent. This is a rather melodramatic way of saying I am tired and I have had enough of it. I figure you are allowed to be melodramatic if you are a President, and especially if you are not getting paid. I left the Imposters in IP to eat, drink and be networked, and I set off on my long journey home. I dragged my rucksack, my suitcase and my backache to Holborn station. It was closed for overcrowding, which is like being closed for refurbishment only without anything to look forward to. So I dragged my rucksack, suitcase and backache along the crowded route to Tottenham Court Road. My back started to shout at me. My feet started to grumble. I got a tube; I walked some more (including up several flights of stairs); I paid my 30p at Paddington to wrestle my suitcase round cubicle doors, for the privilege of spending a penny or 30 and washing my hands. I bought a sandwich. I lugged my screaming back and bits of luggage and sandwich onto a crowded train. The train took me westwards for 90 minutes or so and then chucked me out at Bristol Parkway, so that I could further entertain myself with a long drive down the M5. If this sounds like a massive whinge, well, it is. I never want to take a suitcase to London again. I love CIPA to bits, but I must have been out of my mind to take this job on from a Wess Curntry base. 21 April 2016, 6 pm
This really is a day for namby-pambiness. My final engagement is a Women in IP reception. It is, of course, full of imposters. First we have some drinks. Then we share conspiratorial smiles about the men we know are about to get found out, especially those who rose to the top at a time when there were no women to compete with because the women were assumed to be busy sourcing biscuits. It is a strategic error to overlook the competitive potential of the people sourcing your biscuits. A lot of men are about to find this out. Then we have a talk by the STEMettes, who I have long thought have the coolest name ever, and whose job it is to persuade young girls that they really can build careers for themselves in STEM subjects. They have an uphill struggle, of course, what with the Imposter Syndrome, and with a lot of STEM-based careers involving being the only woman in the engine shed and having to socialise with lap dancers (OK, so I am stereotyping, but with less than 15% women in the UK’s STEM careers, compared to a full 28% in that bastion of blokeishness the House of Lords, clearly there is still something going wrong in the technology hubs of our country). The STEMette who speaks to us is full of energy and enthusiasm. But then, she is young, and that’s what you do when you’re young. She is looking for female role models, she says, in STEM careers. Her audience, many of whom are not so young and who have had to stand throughout the event, meet her gaze with a certain weariness. Many of us will be thinking: what kind of role model am I, tired and jaded, just about meeting my billing targets but longing to go home, and an imposter to boot? We are thinking: can an imposter really be a role model? 21 April 2016, 1.30 pm
Fortunately, the meeting itself is a very positive experience. It is set in a large law firm that cares about diversity. I meet some IP lawyers and some HR experts, and they tell me about community outreach activities and blind recruitment, internal support networks, diversity targets, Flexible Working Committees and other such namby-pambiness. Then I tell them about the patent profession, which thinks it doesn’t have a diversity problem and that unconscious bias is a nasty affliction that only other people, especially evil people, suffer from, and moreover that recoils from collecting diversity data in case somebody sees it. The nice people at the large law firm say: There, there; it must have been a horrible taxi journey; take some deep breaths and have some lunch. Then they say, bless them: We can help you spread the word about diversity (which isn’t a problem) and unconscious bias (which is only for other people), and we can lend you a room in which to do this if you like. And I am so grateful I almost weep on their shoulders. They are women, you see. Women are good at providing shoulders to snivel on. When we have all finished snivelling, the nice people tell me about Imposter Syndrome. This is apparently something many women suffer from. It is when you constantly worry you’re about to get found out for not being up to the job. I say: Yes! I suffer from that! (Only they did find me out. So I was right, see?) Also I say: I work with quite a few men who genuinely are about to get found out, but haven’t yet realised. I am biding my time, I say. We share a conspiratorial smile or two, and the rest of the lunch. 21 April 2016, 6.45 am
Time for a run. Regent’s Park is wide awake with blossom and bud, some bold and blousy, some still tentative like half-open curtains. I run past the early starters at the coffee shops, rough and stubbly with caffeine (them, not me); dodge the street-cleaners; narrowly miss being swept away by the never-ending flow of cyclists that swells and ebbs to the rhythm of the traffic lights. Geese honk at me and pigeons peck irrelevantly by my feet, but I am used to Council meetings so I hardly notice. All is right with the world. What better way to relax after having spoiled several law students’ afternoons yesterday? 21 April 2016, 12.30 pm And what better way to wind myself up again than to take a taxi ride on the CIPA account? The driver appears to know London even less well than I do, which I realise when we go past the same place twice and that it is the place where he picked me up ten minutes ago. We subsequently visit Bloomsbury Square twice as well. We are headed for Southwark. If you have a map of London, you can find Southwark somewhere between a long way from Bloomsbury Square, and Kent. The driver’s satnav is set to perform a loop algorithm, which is: locate traffic jam; arrive at traffic jam; abort; return to starting point. This sequence makes the driver angry, so he sounds his horn to tell other drivers to stop being traffic jams. The temperature in the car goes up. What makes me angry is that when we finally arrive somewhere near where I am aiming for, he tells me he has run out of ideas for getting any closer. He parks up and chivalrously allows me out to drag my suitcase through a high-class office precinct, asking random strangers the way to the building I need. I am late for my meeting. Despite this, before I set off I make time to tell the taxi driver how much I’ve enjoyed my journey today, which I express in negative numbers and powers of ten. 20 April 2016, 2 pm
I have got dressed properly and now the VeePee and I are giving a talk to some university law students. Our title is “IP at the coal face”. This means different things to each of us. For the VeePee, who worked in Big Pharma, the coal face was a rich seam with a thriving colliery astride. For me, the coal face was more of a bucket and spade job. So, the VeePee tells the students about the value of IP to the economy, and about socio-economic models for incentivising innovation and growth. He explains different types of IP strategy, and options for monetising your intangible assets. He speaks of global licensing deals and high-stakes litigation. He shows pie charts and matrices, cites research papers and data. Then it is my turn. I tell them what it is like to be in private practice with a whole range of clients, from those who haven’t a clue about business plans to those who think they are the Devil’s work. Some of these clients, I say, have a good idea but no business. Others have a business but rubbish ideas, particularly when it comes to choosing distinctive trade marks or designing the next must-have consumer product. Some of them, to be honest, just pop by for a chat because they’re lonely. I speak about the clients who walk straight in from the farmyard with their latest invention, which is an apple-powered scarecrow with a gravity-defying anti-badger torpedo mechanism and an angular momentum-busting, Bluetooth®-enabled orientation widget, to whom I say “Hmm. Well. It’s a very nice scarecrow” and they say, “No, that’s not the scarecrow, that’s my dad.” In this way, I give the students a feel for the real-world application of IP and its impact on the Wess Curntry economy, ie, none. Next I take them through a case study I made up, in which I judiciously refrained from mentioning scarecrows and cider-based medicinal formulations, so as to safeguard client confidentiality. The VeePee reads my case study with his usual critical eye and says I have written it like a patent attorney exam paper. I ignore him because actually the case study is doing a very good job of illustrating the diverse IP and business issues that a real-life practitioner has to think about. It has also reminded the students how lucky they are to be studying law in a nice clean university, rather than getting their hands dirty at the intellectual property coal face. At 4 pm the students decide it is time to stop checking their WhatsApp® feeds and go for a drink. I ask if there are any further questions but they have already sussed I don’t have an awful lot of answers, so we all cut our losses. The VeePee and I head back to the coal face. 20 April 2016, 9 am
I have made it all the way to London Paddington with my cardigan on inside out. Regular commuters look out for one another, of course, but only so as not to miss an opportunity to snigger and tweet, so nobody tells me how embarrassingly obvious it is that I was not conscious when I left home this morning. To be honest, I also feel like my brain has been installed upside down. So all I need is to discover my shirt’s on back to front and my mortification will be complete. Oh. |
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