8 November 2016
I hold telecons with a number of people about the IP Inclusive event I am organising for later this month. Which we have to call a party. Because it is. It is to celebrate a whole year of having a diversity Charter and lots of people signing up to it and everyone waiting for everyone else – particularly me – to do something about it. What I have done is to organise an event at which the Charter signatories can hear about what we have all been waiting for and what we are going to wait for next. And in the meantime they can swap ideas about how to be good at diversity and other namby-pamby stuff. This may seem an ineffectual way of tackling the problem, but it is better than not tackling the problem at all. Also today I hold a telecon with someone from the IPO, in which I have to break the news that I am no longer up for doing shedfuls of work for free because my family have told me to get a Proper Job and start paying my way again. I did a lot for CIPA for free last year, I explain, and CIPA just told me off for doing it wrong, so now I must find some gainful employment that I am Properly Qualified to do. So I cannot really do that whole project thing we talked about before, not unless someone is going to pay me to do it. I pause for a second or two. But the man from the IPO fails to grasp the obvious opportunity this presents him with. Instead he says that he and his colleagues will do the project on their own based on the evil plans I drew up for free, and then maybe run it past me for a sanity check going forward into the long grass. I am happy with this. It means nothing and we both know it. The aim of the project was to educate business folk about what IP attorneys do, how they charge for it and how to get the best out of working with them, other than by not working with them at all and going it alone. Going it alone in IP is extremely tricky. It makes a conversation with a patent attorney, taxing though that might be, seem like a walk in the park. But the idea of someone running a completed project – or indeed a completed anything – past me for a “sanity check” is about as insane as you can get. I am not going to hold my breath.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
July 2019
Categories |