17 September 2015
With my colleagues at the day job, I am undergoing some coaching in communication skills. I learn some more about red, yellow, green and blue people. Then we all do a quiz to find out what colour we are, and I end up mainly yellow. This shows, apparently, that I am an extrovert and I like people more than tasks. On the plus side, it means that I no longer need to worry about completing anything. On the minus side, it means I have to start being sociable. Then we have some coaching on time management. The coach says: Identify your least productive times of day, and do your emails in them. I say I spend the least productive parts of my day in meetings. He says Do your emails in the more productive times then. I say I spend the more productive times in meetings too. He says When do you do your emails? I say I think I do my emails in my sleep. I say: Other people think that too. The coach suggests we make a list of the tasks we have to do when we get back to our desks after having been coached, and decide whether they are urgent or important, or both, or neither. I cannot remember all my tasks but I know that the very thought of them makes me weep. This is probably not a good starting point. However, since I am officially Yellow and I like people more than tasks, I can presumably dispense with the list altogether and just continue with my rolling programme of ongoing friendliness.
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15 September 2015, 2 pm
I have managed to persuade Council that although our Strategic Plan is a three-year Strategic Plan, this does not mean we only have to look at it again in 36 months’ time. We need to Review it. We need to Refresh it. We need to keep it on a rolling programme of ongoing strategic-ness, because that is what being strategic is all about. So we hold a meeting. Just a few of us who really care about this type of thing. And although there are no flip charts this time, there are certainly 36 months’ worth of biscuits. Mr Davies takes notes, so that when he drafts the New Reviewed Refreshed Strategic Plan, he can pretend he only wrote what we told him to. We all know he makes it up as he goes along. But he does it so well. We realise we have actually – and perhaps accidentally – completed a lot of the things that the first Strategic Plan said we had to do in 2015. Or at least made a good start on them. This is reassuring. So much so that I think we can almost afford to put “conquering the world” into our 2018 objectives. Later in the evening, some of us get back together for celebratory drinks. We are in such a high-class drinking establishment that when I ask what gins are available (which I am wont to do) I am offered Bacardi® as one of the options. Bacardi is not a gin. Even I know that. Bacardi is something you drink when you are wearing a Hawaiian beach shirt. And I am not. 16 September 2015 I meet with the Chief Eggsek and the Onssek in a coffee shop. Together we go to see the Legal Services Board to tell them what we think of IPReg. This is part of the LSB’s rolling programme of ongoing feedback-gathering, and they are doing it on all the legal services regulators even those they hadn’t previously heard of. They ask us what IPReg do well and what we would like IPReg to do better. Then they look like they wish they hadn’t asked. I wonder if they are also going to ask IPReg what CIPA do well and what they would like CIPA to do better. It would seem only fair. When we leave, Mr Davies and I go for a coffee to make evil plans. My head is hurting a little due to my rolling programme of ongoing drunkenness last night, although I swear I never touched the Bacardi®. While we are making evil plans, it starts to pour with rain. Possibly this is an omen. 15 September 2015, 10 am
This morning I go to two Congress planning meetings. Because you can never plan a Congress too much. Not this close to the deadline, anyway. I learn that all sorts of things go on in the background when you are organising a CIPA Congress. There are menus to taste, vans to hire, lanyards to print, balloons to pump and party bags to fill with Congress merchandise such as, well, lanyards and CIPA pens. I don’t like to ask about party poppers but I do hope they haven’t been forgotten. Mr Davies and I are making another evil plan for the Congress dinner, which is to ask our speakers to nominate things for The IP Room 101. I have written to the speakers already to tell them about this evil plan. I said if they didn’t like the evil plan they should let me know as soon as possible so that I could get cross with them. Now it is time for Mr Davies to organise some props for the occasion, such as a large bin to represent Room 101. Congress is clearly not what it used to be. This I take to be a Good Thing. We also have to buy some trophies for the lucky winners of this year’s inaugural CIPA awards. Mr Davies and I trawl the websites of TrophiesRUs and other similar outfits. It seems the internet is full of boring trophies and rude trophies and just plain tasteless trophies. But it is hard to find something suitably dignified to hand to a patent attorney. We cannot go for anything breakable, obviously, because the awards are to be presented by the CIPA Pee and the CIPA Pee does not expect to be in a fit state to handle breakable objects. I believe there is something in the Bye-laws about being drunk in charge of a trophy, but I intend to ignore it. We are rewriting the Bye-laws anyway. 14 September 2015, 1 pm
CIPA Hall is packed. We have a live link-up to the EPO in The Hague, where some kindly folk are going to stage a mock oral proceedings for us to watch. Mr Roberts is chairing and I am there in case he needs anyone to blame. It is all extremely exciting. Every ten minutes or so, the live link-up becomes a dead link-up and we have to fetch Mr Mische, CIPA's IT guru, from his den full of unpatentable subject matter. Mr Mische uses his IT skills to resuscitate the link-up and the excitement resumes. Eventually I learn that the IT skills involve a green button with a picture of a telephone on. There is also a microphone that allows Mr Roberts to talk to the people in The Hague. Only we are not allowed to use the microphone all the time because of the Echo, so Mr Roberts has to keep unplugging himself. When he forgets, I unplug him. The subject matter of the patent-in-a-suit is a garden hose. It is so well claimed that it is anticipated by a device intended to keep cod steaks moist on the supermarket fish counter. The attorney in The Hague says the cod steak moisturiser would be totally unsuitable for watering a garden, on account of it being too tiny. The Primary Examiner says but you might have a tiny garden. For instance a bonsai garden. This is a difficult argument to refute. When we reach the most exciting part of the oral proceedings, which is the part where the Examining Division have decided the auxiliary requests are as rubbish as the main request, we adjourn to discuss what the attorney in The Hague should do in response. The Primary Examiner is still going on about bonsai gardens. Goaded by Mr Roberts, we decide we would like to submit an auxiliary request number 2½, instead of auxiliary request number 3 in the instructions Mr Roberts was given beforehand. He plugs himself back in to break this news to the Examining Division. They become a little flustered. I have to unplug Mr Roberts again to avoid upsetting them further. There is much talk about the dimensions of garden hoses, and bonsai gardens, and PVC, and bonsai gardens. Eventually auxiliary request 2½ is rejected for being unplugged and insufficiently bonsai-d and auxiliary request 3 is allowed. It is time to press the red button with a picture of a telephone on, and send everyone home. That went well, says Mr Roberts. For the sixth time today, I unplug him. 11 September 2015
It occurs to me that with all this fuss about chasing members to respond to the Bye-laws review, and my fabulous video which has prompted at least eight more responses, perhaps I ought to get my finger out and file some comments of my own. I am, after all, a CIPA Fellow good and true. Rats. This means I shall have to read the draft Bye-laws properly instead of just swanning around urging other people to read them. I start early but by the time I have finished wittering my response it is nearly time for a gin and tonic. In fact, it is so nearly time for a gin and tonic that there is little point waiting the extra hour or so. After the gin and tonic, I am suitably impressed with the wittering. It is about as fabulous as the video. And that is saying something. 12 September 2015 Saturday. Rain. There is nothing for it but to progress my Congress speech. Since I have now done the opening section, about fire exits and mobile phones, I decide to start work on the closing section, and then fill in the middle nearer the time. I open v1 and resave it as v2. I give it a new footer, with a new date in, and save again. I add a subheading “Closing remarks”. It is still only half past nine. I get myself a Red Bull®. I drink the Red Bull. My pulse goes up but not, sadly, my productivity. I check my emails; there are none. I re-save the speech, just in case. I listen to the rain. At five to ten, inspiration comes at last. “I hope you enjoyed Congress,” I write. Save. Pause. “Thank you for listening.” Save. And since I have now spent an hour on this speech, I think it is time to have a break from the CIPA work. 14 September 2015, 10.30 am The Protected Titles Committee holds a telephone meeting. There are only four of us, and I am only there because I am the Pee. It is hard to find people to get excited about Protected Titles. We talk about dissolving what’s left of the committee. We are thinking that if anyone is ever naughty enough to call themselves a patent attorney when they’re not a patent attorney, we can just set Mr Davies onto them. And it does not take a whole committee to set Mr Davies onto someone. My next telephone meeting is with Rosa Wilkinson from the IPO. She and I are in charge of the first session of the 2015 CIPA Congress, and we have some evil plans to make. Actually, we should have been making the evil plans several months ago, but we got distracted by caramel custard tarts. We will make up for it now. 8 September 2015
I attend a meeting of the Litigation Committee. Lucky old Litigation Committee. The people there are dead excited about UK patent attorneys getting representation rights in the UPC. There are rules to say that people like me can be what is affectionately termed “grandfathered” in. I do not find this exciting; I find it terrifying. But some people find it exciting. And this is why I am a CIPA President and not a patent attorney litigator. After the meeting I eat out with the Chair of the Litigation Committee and the Chair of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, who are both really friendly people and partial to a nice bit of lunch. We talk about committee terms of reference. Council has decreed that forthwith shall each and every committee prepare for itself some duly fitting statement of the remit and objectives thereof, which shall be called Terms of Reference and shall be proffered for the blessing of Council to be bestowed upon them. They say We are not quite sure what to put in our Terms of Reference. I say Eat up we’ll think of something later. Towards the end of lunch, we are joined by the Chair of the EPO Liaison Ex-Sub-Committee of the Patents Committee and Vice-Chair of the International Liaison Committee’s Working Group for China, or Gwilym Roberts for short. Mr Roberts is also partial to a nice bit of lunch, but he is too late for lunch so I buy him a coffee instead. By now, it is beginning to look as though the CIPA Pee just sits in a restaurant all afternoon graciously granting audiences and flat whites to passing Fellows. I return to CIPA for a meeting with the Chair of the Designs & Copyright Committee. He is the sixth committee chair I have met with in the last two days. But it is important to be in with the committees at CIPA, because it is the committees who know what’s going on. Pretty much everyone else is just guessing. 7 September 2015
Mr Davies and I visit the President of the Law Society. This is a humbling experience. The Law Society has a gazillion members across the whole of the solar system, and it has the ear of everybody from the Lord Chancellor downwards, possibly upwards as well. And it is on telly a lot and famous across the world, so that the President has to do a lot of exhausting travelling because he is so much in demand. And also because he is so much in demand, he has an office of his own at the top of the Law Society building and a real live drinks trolley in it so he can serve us tea. He tells us what the Law Society is up to these days, which takes a while because what it is up to is Tons of Important Stuff. Then he asks what CIPA is up to these days. We sip our tea and shrug and we say, Well, pretty similar really, you know how it is. 5 September 2015
It is time to write another speech. This year, because I am Pee not VeePee, I have to give the opening speech at Congress. I am, essentially, the warm-up act. And they have told me no straw this year, we have not lived down last year’s yet. I open a new blank document on the computer. It does indeed look very blank. I save it as 150905 congress speech v1, ever hopeful that there will be a v2 and a v3 that are actually worth saving. I pause to collect my thoughts. There are not many to collect, and none of them relate to the speech. I give the document a title. And a footer. I save it again, in case there is a power cut. There is a pause, which even Windows® 10 seems unable to take care of. I alter the font size in the title. Then the colour. I save this too. You never know when the power might go down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I write. “Welcome to Congress.” Save. Pause. “I hope you enjoy it.” Save. Pause. “Please turn your mobile phones to silent. The fire exits are behind you (I think). There is free wifi. There are biscuits. Don’t forget to visit our sponsors in the exhibition hall..." Pause. "...or they will be sad." Sometimes you just wish the power would go down. 2 September 2015
Today CIPA is conducting an evil experiment to see how many meetings you can subject human beings to in one day before they break. Thus we have a Congress Steering Committee meeting from 10 till 11 am, an Internal Governance Committee meeting from 11 am till 1 pm, and from 1 pm till 2 pm a meeting of the CIPA bigwigs, ie the VeePee and the EyePeePee and the Onssek and the Chief Eggsek and also me. At 2.30 pm there is a Council meeting, which I must chair, and straight after that there is an Ordinary General Meeting, which I must also chair, so actually it is far from ordinary. And then, apparently, it is Happy Hour. I am not sure what there is to be happy about. Organising a meeting that starts at the same time as another meeting ends is not only unhealthy, it is a breach of basic human rights, such as for example the right to food and water and the right to check emails. The other subjects of the experiment survive longer, but I am well broken by half past one. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were the kind of person who could just sit doodling in a meeting, but no, I am the type who has to keep opening my mouth and volunteering to do things, or being volunteered to do things by someone else, so that I always emerge from a meeting with at least three new pieces of work and an almost limitless capacity for misunderstanding what I was supposed to do with them. By the time I arrive at the Council meeting, I am feeling quite fierce. I tell people to shut up a lot, and I make them put their hands up and speak in turn, and in this way we manage to finish in time to check our emails before the OGM starts. But in the break, three other people subject me to additional mini-meetings in corridors and small rooms and in the dark corners of CIPA Hall, because you cannot have a President standing idle. I believe, nevertheless, that it is what one might term a Productive Day. We almost finalise the Congress programme, apart from the bits I am supposed to have organised, and the mad bits that I have only just thought of. We check the accounts and the budget, and then ignore them both for long enough to decide how to fund regional meetings and international liaison trips and somewhere for the Pee to stay when the Pee lives a long way from London and is taking part in evil experiments for two days running. We decide some stuff about regulation, which is largely to do with me being too namby-pamby and friendly and not realising that everyone I meet is actually trying to get one up on CIPA. We decide some stuff about committees, which is largely to do with them having to make a list of the things they do and then Council saying The list is not good enough go and do it again, so that in the end every committee’s list will say simply “We make lists.” We almost decide CIPA’s view on the EU referendum, too, except that we cannot agree on the wording so then we decide that we need to take a little more time deciding. Luckily, the referendum is not going to happen any time soon. The rest of us refer to the referendum by the popular code-word Brexit. Mr Davies refuses to call it Brexit because he says Brexit is an ugly word, so he is particularly slow writing the minutes today because “referendum” may be more beautiful, as words go, but it has a whole lot more letters than “Brexit”. In the OGM I have to make things up as I go along because I have got the wrong glasses on and cannot read the agenda that Mr Davies has so carefully prepared by copying the last OGM agenda and changing the date. I make some things up about the diversity task force (da-da-da-DA!!), and the three non-Council members who have bothered to turn up to the OGM – as opposed to going directly to the Happy Hour – listen with rapt enthralled-ness. I show them a video about unconscious bias too. Everyone laughs and says We are not like that in the IP professions; we are not biased at all. Next month I will show them a video about irony. |
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