10 January 2017, mid-day
I have spent the morning preparing for the EPO conference, by reading documents about university IP management. I discover there is a lot of helpful information about, from the IPO and the EPO and even the European Commission, telling universities what to put in their IP policies. I suspect, however, that the problem is not to do with what goes in the IP policy, so much as what the IP policy goes in. If it goes in a drawer somewhere and you do not tell either your students or your staff that it exists, then it is going to be about as much use as the CIPA Stapler Refilling Policy. Which I wrote one day when I was bored, and Mr Davies said Thank you that’s lovely, and filed it away under A for Andrea’s Junk. My research takes me to a recent survey of UK university students and staff. This revealed the not very surprising fact that many students do not know whether their institution has an IP policy or not, and those who know there is one cannot tell you what it says. Still others are not sure why IP policies are necessary, until you explain that they are generously donating their ideas to the public domain which is gratefully turning them into somebody else’s profit: then they take notice. To be fair, probably most of the CIPA staff do not realise we have a Stapler Refilling Policy either, and those who do are not aware that it requires Council’s permission for refills of more than 30 staples at a time. In this sense, the Legacy part of my Presidency has not been entirely successful.
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3 January 2017
I have given up Red Bull®, chocolate and alcohol for the month. I no longer have anything to look forward to between meals except checking my CIPA emails. This may sound like a First World Problem but it is the most serious I’ve come across for a while. It is the Red Bull I miss the most. How do you get through a whole day without caffeine? 4 January 2017 And today brings the ultimate test. I need to get through a whole day and a CIPA Council meeting, without caffeine to help me along and without the promise of a gin and tonic afterwards. Fortunately, the President announces that the Council meeting is going to be Short. He has some quaint idea that this is linked to the agenda being short. Personally I never found much correlation between agenda length and meeting length; CIPA Council meetings last till gone 5 pm regardless, and if there are insufficient agenda items, people will make some up. That’s what “Any Other Business” is for. But the President is going to be Fierce, he says. I know about being Fierce. I am an expert at it. I have been practising ready for my Fierce EPO panel discussion. But actually, the President is not fierce in the meeting at all. Not by CIPA standards. I have seen patent attorneys being fiercer than this in the queue for the EPO photocopier. The meeting goes on till nearly 5 pm. By this time my face is in my keyboard and my husband is busy cooking tea. Tonight we are going to eat Leftovers. Yum. 28 December 2016
It has been Christmas. The house is full of gratuitous sparkle and more recycling than the Council will ever agree to collecting. The fridge is full of leftovers – and these will not get eaten because people are intrinsically uninterested in leftovers when there are cakes, biscuits, sweets and chocolates on every available surface, but we are keeping them nonetheless because the Keeping of Leftovers is an important British Christmas tradition. I have not checked my CIPA emails for several days. It is possible, then, that the Institute has meanwhile merged with Club 18-30® in a last-ditch rejuvenation attempt by Mr Davies. It is possible that Council has been disbanded. Or even that the CIPA kitchen fridge has been cleaned out. But the truth is that nobody else has been doing anything CIPA-related either, not even the Kitchen Fridge Pixies who were last seen in 1992 borrowing a couple of beers and a pasty. So, not checking my emails is no problem at all. My sister visits with her family; I cook delicious things for them but they prefer Heinz® tomato soup, they say. My mother visits too: I cook delicious things for her which she used to cook for me but no longer remembers anything about. My children are all home: I cook delicious things for them but they are too full of cake to eat them, except at midnight when I am not looking, because as every student knows, food tastes better when it is stolen. The things that get stolen the most are the things I was planning to use as crucial ingredients in the following day’s meals. This is inconvenient to say the least, but inconvenience is what kids do best, and at least these days they only do it outside of term time. When they return to university, I will discover in their rooms the unsubtle evidence of their midnight feasts, along with an equally unsubtle indication of which of their carefully-chosen Christmas presents were sufficiently attractive to accompany them back. Usually it is the carefully-chosen bottle-shaped presents which find favour. The Useful Gifts are abandoned. But then, the Useful Gifts have also been carefully chosen, with a view to their being Useful to me as well. So I am actually quite glad they get left behind. I am relying on it, in fact. 13 December 2016
Today’s telecon is about the IP Inclusive Charter and how we are going to motivate all the Charter signatories into helping us out with stuff. Our starting point is a recent survey, in which some of the signatories rashly ticked the “yes” boxes to say yes they were up for hosting events, yes they could provide speakers, yes they could write blogs for us and yes what was the question again? We agree which of us is going to contact each of these hapless victims and break the good news to them. The good news being that yes means yes, Theresa May-style, and that they are about to be the lucky recipient of an event to host, a speaker to provide or a blog that needs writing. I am ready for them to become less interested in diversity at this point. 8 December 2016
I speak with the person organising the EPO conference, the one where I am moderating a panel discussion. My topic is the essential elements of a successful university IP culture. I am of course highly qualified for my role, because (a) I have been to university, (b) I know a bit about IP, albeit less than I used to, (c) I know about culture, having spent several nights in London and (d) I am Fierce. It is the fierceness that I suspect will be the most important element of moderating this, as indeed any, panel discussion. The organiser reminds me that some of the people attending the conference will be from universities that have little or no IP culture. This is why we have to concentrate on the essential elements. Forget the fancy-pantsy stuff, I am told; some of these universities don’t even know what IP is. I am thinking that if they don’t even know what IP is, they will be very surprised to find themselves at a conference about it. 7 December 2016
’Tis the first Wednesday of the month. I am chained to the phone from 11 am till nearly 5 pm, attending (albeit remotely) a plethora of beautiful meetings. A great deal of laughter goes on in these meetings. When the laughter happens, the phone explodes and I cannot hear what anyone is saying until they have all settled down again. You don’t realise when you’re there in person that for the telephone attendee, a moment of mirth is like a cistern full of white noise. Mirth should be banned from all CIPA meetings. We did not do Mirth the year I was President. But there were a number of reasons for that; it was not entirely out of consideration for the telephone attendees. 5 December 2016
A week after the first, we arrive at the second student induction day for 2016. This time there are only CIPA people, so we do not have to worry about being chartered or not. I have to do Mr Dixon’s talk as well as my own, because Mr Dixon is somewhere else being important in the context. It is tedious for the students to have to listen to me for so long, but they are well behaved and we get through it. I quite enjoy using Mr Dixon’s slides – which I virtually know by heart anyway having sat through them twice a year since 2010 – but adding my own interpretations. He will never find out what I’ve said about his ideas on fixed price patent applications. Mwa ha ha! (Unless of course one of these students ends up working for him. Or indeed already works for him. So perhaps I am a little bit scared after all.) 30 November 2016, 9 pm
I am dining with the Past Presidents of CIPA. Every year this noble brigade gathers together to celebrate the fact that they no longer have to fulfil any Presidential duties. By way of sport, it is customary for them to invite the current President to tell them what is going on at CIPA these days, and then to re-enact the Council meetings of their time by heckling and inciting wrath and generally stirring the Pot of Presidential Pestilence. But more on that later. I should point out that in line with this tradition, although against some of their better judgements, they duly invited me to their dinner this time last year. In line with various other CIPA traditions, or perhaps by way of additional sport, they held their dinner in a gentlemen’s club. And whilst I was assured that Special Dispensations could be made to allow me into this hallowed environment, I felt obliged to point out that it was against my personal and professional ethics to enter into discriminatory environments, however hallowed, and even dispensatably. So, basically, I didn’t turn up. And someone else had to tell them what was going on at CIPA and no doubt it was a good thing I wasn’t there to hear the response. But I digress. I have been welcomed most nobly into this year’s gathering. There is another Presidentess there, and she looks fiercer and more Past-Presidential than I do, so there have been no brandy-and-cigar moments and indeed no funny business at all. I have dined well. The company has been enjoyable. And the slight wooziness I am experiencing is only partly due to finding myself in a room full of past incarnations, like a Doctor Who Christmas Special, the other part being due to the many gin and tonics it took to incite me there in the first place. I regret neither the incitement nor the gin. We have finished our desserts and the current Pee, Mr Rollins, begins his speech about what is going on at CIPA these days. After a while I note that the dessert and the wooziness are taking their toll, and that at least half of our eminent Past Presidents are nodding off. Each in turn wakes to receive the circulating port decanter, and then returns to slumber having passed it to the next. The decanter goes clockwise. Of course. A Past President who did not know that would be an imposter indeed. Then Mr Rollins reaches the point in his speech that is about Regulation. Suddenly, all of the Past Presidents snap out of their reveries and into action. They begin to contribute expressions of outrage from all sides of the table. Each has known all along that This Would Happen, and each has a suggestion about how Mr Rollins can Put Regulation In Its Place. Some of these suggestions date back from before we had a Legal Services Act and some of them from before the UK abolished hanging as a punishment for causing offence to right-minded gentlemen. The discussion does indeed begin to sound very like a Council meeting. Mr Rollins looks perplexed: he was not expecting audience participation. I look relieved: I am glad I avoided doing this when I was the Pee. This is, however, better-natured than your average Council meeting, because no one is taking minutes, no one is asking us to stick to an agenda, and no one requires any concrete outcomes, other than the abolition of all things Regulatory of course. I begin to wonder whether our actual Council meetings might be more productive if we were to adopt a similar format – including the port-passing protocol. The Past Presidents tell Mr Rollins that in this room there is a wealth of wisdom and experience, and that he should turn to them as often as he likes during his Presidency for Sound Counsel and support. Mr Rollins says thank you, he will. No he won’t. If there were Sound Counsel to be had in a roomful of sleepily cantankerous Past Presidents, some of whom remember a long way back but many of whom have forgotten the Legal Services Act 2007, then every President would seek it. But I have not known this to happen, ever. Even I, who was a rubbish President and had to ask other people how to do pretty much everything, never called on the Past Presidents’ Brigade. Life is too short to ask a plurality of patent attorneys for advice. Possibly life and death together are too short for that. 30 November 2016, 2 pm
The marketing managers reconvene after lunch. Mr Lampert chairs a discussion about how CIPA can work with them to promote chartered patent attorneys. Mr Dixon arrives on the stage to be Mr Dixon, who is important in this context because he is the Vice-Chair of the Media & PR Committee and also he is not a clown. Mr Lampert and Mr Dixon show us some promotional videos which CIPA has produced. The videos are about how brilliant patent attorneys can be, and how grateful their clients are to have got such beautiful patents and some free product placement to boot. There are no women in the videos, nor any ethnic minorities. Not even in the background. I point this out to Mr Lampert, who sighs, because it took him ages to get to the point where a patent attorney in front of a camera looked even half-way human and he’s not sure he can go through it all again just to improve CIPA’s namby-pamby diversity credentials. What he does not realise, of course, is how far we have come already. Twenty years ago no one would have noticed a point like this; no one would have even thought to say Hang on a minute, where are all the patent attorneyettes? They would have thought: Crikey, is that not a trifle risqué, taking moving pictures of a CIPA Fellow at work? 30 November 2016, 11 am
What better way to spend a bright, sunny, frosty morning than staring into the frosty faces of a room full of marketing managers and trying to make them laugh with my feeble attempts at making fun of the patent profession? I can tell the marketing managers are themselves thinking there must be better ways of spending the morning. I am the warm-up act. This was Mr Lampert’s idea. He thought it would be fun if I kicked off today’s meetings – which are centred on the “Promoting the UK IP professions abroad” initiative – with a light-hearted look at how it began. I tell them the truth. Then I tell them the key messages we came up with about how brilliant the UK’s IP professionals are. Which is also the truth, although it is the truth as written in my Secret Diary the day after the first round-table meeting, and sometimes the truth in my Secret Diary has an ever-so-subtle Andrea slant on it. The audience is wondering who allowed this clown to take the stage and how dare she make fun of the patent profession’s lack of self-awareness. The current VeePee, Mr Jones, stands up after me and he finds it hard to mask his own bewilderment. I don’t know what to say about Andrea, he begins. For this read: I know exactly what to say about Andrea but it would be unprofessional to say it in public; come talk to me over lunch and I will gladly elaborate. It seems churlish to point out that it is only thanks to this clown that the IP professions got together in the first place to talk about a combined approach to promoting themselves abroad. That was in November 2015, and in view of the Brexit debacle and the uncertainty over the UPC, we are going to be mightily glad we have something to say for ourselves when we visit foreign lands. So I know exactly what I would say about Andrea which is that at least she Gets Things Done. Still, I think you are supposed to Get Things Done in a slightly more dignified fashion and I concede that the mode of my arrival onto the CIPA scene, not to mention my subsequent period of office, was ever-so-slightly Trump-esque. |
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