24 November 2015
It is already that time of year: the time when we invite new students to come and visit CIPA and subject them to an onslaught of lectures which are supposed to reassure them but actually, I suspect, just terrify the pants off them. Our key messages are roughly thus: Me: Welcome to CIPA, which is lovely. We hope you enjoy today. We hope you make lots of friends. You are going to need them. Speaker 1: You thought you’d chosen a job about science and law, because you like science and law, but actually it is about business. Here is lots of information about business assets and strategic planning and competitive advantage. If you do not understand this you will be a rubbish patent attorney even if you do pass all the exams. Which is not a given. Me: Be nice to your clients. They are human beings. If you think you’re scared, they are ten times more scared. Speaker 2: Let’s talk about professional ethics and the IPReg Code of Conduct. If you are not ethical, RUIN will surely follow and you will be cast out from this wonderful profession for ever and left in the gutter to rot. Your clients will regularly try to persuade you to be unethical in pursuit of better client relations and increased billing figures. Accede at your peril. Clients are human beings and in the context of professional ethics, this is not a plus. Also, never do anything you’re not competent to do and in particular never do it for two different clients at once as this is called a Conflict of Interest and patent attorneys can die from Conflict of Interest. Me: There are lots of ways that clients can complain about you, and lots of reasons they might do so, especially if you refuse to be unethical on their behalf. Also you might make mistakes. So you must follow my simple 21-step process for handling complaints and mistakes, which will require you to devote the next fifteen working days to the maintenance of a detailed complaints handling file. Speaker 3: As well as being brilliantly competent, commercially astute, ethical and also Nice To Your Clients, and in between handling complaints and mistakes using the correct 21-step process, you are also expected to make some profit for your employer. You make profit by convincing clients – ethically, of course – to send you lots more work, and then billing them for it, and then making sure they pay the bills, preferably without complaining. You can convince clients to send you more work by getting other people to tell them you are brilliant. However, you must also remember there is a Bribery Act 2010. If you do not make a profit for your employer, your employer will go bankrupt and you and your colleagues will be out on the streets with nothing but a Pot Noodle® for your Christmas dinner. (There follows a lunch break, in which the shell-shocked youngsters are allowed to weep on one another’s shoulders in despair. We remind them that phoning a recruitment agency at this point will be treated as a serious disciplinary offence.) Mr Davies: And now we are going to split you into groups, and in your groups you are going to come up with ideas about what you need from your representative body, because CIPA is bored of thinking of things on its own. And please do not say counselling and helplines and hostels for people who would otherwise be on the streets because they have been unethical or incompetent. We are a close-knit community and we rally together to SHUN anyone who is unethical or incompetent in our midst. Speaker 4: Your career will be beset by stress. There are many signs that stress is developing, and you probably have all of them. The only way you can beat stress is by not doing so much work, but this will stress other people, especially the ones who have to do the stuff you don’t finish. When you get stressed, you should talk to someone about it, which will increase their stress levels as well because they also have deadlines to meet. The people you must not talk to about being stressed are your boss (who might fire you), someone you fancy (who might suggest inappropriate ways of reducing the stress) and your doctor (who might prescribe pills to calm you down, which could result in your becoming so laid-back you no longer count as a patent attorney and indeed in your sticking two fingers up at the Code of Conduct and running off to become a hermit). Speaker 5: Here is how you qualify as a patent attorney. It is a long and arduous path. This, for instance, is a timeline showing how many years it will take. And here is a graph showing pass rates for the final exams. If you fail at the first attempt you are very likely to fail all subsequent resits so do not be tempted to sit the exams until you are absolutely sure you have no other options left. Speaker 6 (who is actually Mr Heap from IPReg, being interviewed in the style of a talk show): I cannot remember what is in the Code of Conduct but if you think it is “light touch” you have another think coming. It is actually “principles-based”, which means that it is up to you to decide what you have to do to comply with it, and up to us to tell you afterwards whether you decided right. This is because we know what patent attorneys are like: if you give them clear rules they will find the loopholes, and if you give them unclear rules they will complain under Article 84, so it is better not to give them rules at all. Also we have stopped paying attention to complaints by one patent attorney about another patent attorney, which in this small, close-knit, mutually-supportive community are just a little too frequent. This is because we know you are just trying to use the IPReg Code as a back door route to winning your opposition. We are not prepared to turn up in Munich and pull your opponent out of a hearing simply because he lied about his age once. Me: So you see, it is a fantastic profession you have joined. You have a lot to look forward to. Please exchange business cards now because in ten years’ time many of the people you met today will be on the streets, or will be hermits, or will have retrained as stress counsellors, and in the latter case you might need to get back in touch.
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