27 November 2015, 10 am
Gathered at CIPA Hall is a roomful of patent and trade mark attorneys and IP solicitors. Plus two people from the IPO. Plus Mr Davies, who introduces himself as the plumber who came four years ago to fix the toilet and forgot to leave (this is not helpful in the context, I feel, especially since the toilet is still not fixed but everything else has been well and truly disrupted). Plus Mr Lampert, who is going to take notes in Pitman shorthand, because he is a journalist and cannot do proper writing. I have summoned, I mean invited, these people so that we can all talk together about promoting the UK IP system abroad. We are fed up of going to foreign lands and saying, “The UK is quite good at IP, a little bit,” and the foreign land people saying, “But the Germans said they were better.” And then us saying, “Oh, yes, sorry, perhaps you’re right, we’ll get our coats.” We decide that we absolutely must present a united front to establish the UK as a Centre of IP Excellence (I have no idea what this means, but I have been saying it so much that now everyone assumes it is a valid expression). We absolutely must rally together to bring in bounteous supplies of new IP work from emerging markets, before the bounteous supplies land in Frankfurt or Munich. To do this, we absolutely must first develop some Key Messages about Why the UK is a Centre of IP Excellence and indeed about What Exactly Is a Centre of IP Excellence, and then we can all go out and spread these messages, and the IPO and their friends in the Government can take the messages in their diplomatic briefcases wherever they go. All good meetings need to come up with Key Messages. And when we have come up with the Key Messages, Mr Lampert can make us a Key Brochure and a Key Shouty Video to showcase them. Here are our Key Messages:
I am pleased with this collection of Key Messages and am looking forward to seeing Mr Lampert’s video about it. A good morning’s work, superbly chaired by Yours Truly, and I only had to tell people twice that they were veering off topic. We were not supposed to be talking about Lederhosen.
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25 November 2015, 1 pm
Next I go off to be an imposter at the IPKat IP Editors’ and Publishers’ Lunch. I am not an IP editor or an IP publisher, and although I did once write a blog I had to stop due to its upsetting three people. But I quite like editors and publishers, due to their not being patent attorneys. The lunch is in a very hot room. It is a close-run thing as to who wilts first, the people or the lettuce leaves. The sandwiches are curling at the edges, and they are probably toxic now anyway, their contents having been nicely incubated for an hour or so. I stick to the orange juice. While we stand wilting, we are treated to a speech by someone who is both an IP lawyer and an author. He is cross about sloppy writing. Sloppy writing happens when people don’t stick to the Rules. They split infinitives and they splice commas; they don’t know how to use the subjunctive (were that appropriate); they leave prepositions sitting around at the ends of sentences like baggage blocking an exit through which you were trying to get through. They don’t realise that data is the plural of datum, like alba is the plural of album and i is the plural of us (at the end of a word, anyway, as in Aberdeen Angi). Before you know it they are getting their facts wrong, shoving in malapropisms and inventing wordification strategistics. Some of them do not even know an acronym from an abbreviation. WTF??? At the end of the pedant’s speech, we get to ask questions. Few of us dare, for fear of getting our grammar wrong. However (this being, incidentally, a word the pedant treats with disdain), one brave person does. He is the nice journalist from this morning, who is a historian not a lawyer, and therefore knows that there is a time and a place for old-fashioned artefacts and it is not 2015. He says, Surely the rules of language change? (He is possibly thinking back to his interview with the CIPA President.) Perhaps in time, he adds, we will be writing our legal texts entirely in emojis? The speaker does not reply. Probably he thinks “emoji” is neither an abbreviation nor an acronym but more of an abomination, and anyway if it is not mentioned in Fowler’s then it does not really warrant his attention. The nice journalist challenges us all to develop an emoji for the person skilled in the art. I can certainly think of one for the problem and solution approach; it already exists and in the interests of decorum it is not used in legal texts at the moment. But it could be… Personally, I am not convinced that language needs rules. It should be principles-based, like IP regulation. The only rule should be “Get some words, and put them together in a way that makes sense.” Even I can sometimes do that. 25 November 2015, 10.30 am
Because I am now Important and A Little Bit Famous, I am going to be interviewed by a journalist. The journalist is very friendly and he has brought a lady journalist along too, in case I start doing girly things like crying or falling in love or rummaging in my handbag. He asks me what I have been doing in my time as President. Naturally I do not tell him the truth. Instead I tell him all the things I wanted to do, and all the things I have told other people I have done, and all the things I am just about to do honest. The truth is, of course, that mostly I have been compiling a to-do list and every weekend I spend an hour thinking what an impressive set of plans I have and moving all the dates on by a month until eventually they end up in the period when someone else is Pee. The truth is that I have not had time to do many of the things on the to-do list, and the ones I have done have resulted in complaints. I tell the journalists that CIPA has been Engaging with its Stakeholders. This is what Mr Lampert told me to say. They ask: Who are these Stakeholders that you have been Engaging with? I knew there was a reason I shouldn’t have said what Mr Lampert told me to. I say: They are the people we have been Reaching Out to, because CIPA is a Thought Leader and a Go-To Organisation and it will head up the Key Mindset-Changing Initiatives going forward. Shall we talk about diversity? So then we talk about the seriously improper diversity launch event that I have seriously not got proper permission for, and about why greater diversity will be good for the IP professions. The journalists ask if I think the professions will look different in ten years’ time. Mr Lampert did not tell me the answer to that one, so I guess it is a trick question. I say Of course they will look different. Absolutely they will look different. They’d better do. 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. 21 November 2015
I work from morning till night on CIPA business, to make amends for my rubbish, unpresidential behaviour yesterday. I don’t finish, and I probably don’t deserve to. 22 November 2015 It is Stir-Up Sunday. Well, no, it is not actually Stir-Up Sunday, but in our house it is, because we were worried the brandy might not make it through another week. I am a sucker for the smell of Christmas, me. The first graze of the orange zest makes me think of foil whispering on the tree, lights spilling and baubles spinning colours across the room, the fresh nutmeg and the woody curl of the cinnamon sticks, rich dark brandy-soaked raisins, the crackle of paper and hiss of candle flame, deep green of holly and fir, red of ribbon and cranberry. Of course, life in our house is nothing like this at Christmas, but I have watched the films and read the books and I know what it is supposed to be like. And the mixed spice smell is enough to make me feel we might achieve it this time. I think that every year. After attending to the pudding, I return to my slides for the insufficiently Proper and Serious diversity task force launch event. It will be improperly and unseriously happening very soon indeed. 20 November 2015
OK, so dinner is not all I did. Those who know me well also know that I rarely turn down an opportunity to sample a whisky or three. Especially if I am cruelly goaded into doing so by friendly patent attorneys who ought to know better. I believe we sampled a few, between us, and also I believe we conducted a highly scientific experiment into the effect of a drop of water on a good malt. There was a control and everything; it was a great experiment. I think I may have drunk too much of the placebo. Anyway, food poisoning or spiked drink or sheer stupidity, whatever the cause, I spend most of today in my hotel room, or more particularly, in the ensuite part of it. My body is finding its own toxin-eliminating strategy, and it does not involve hot lava shells. Like a patent attorney desperately failing to meet a deadline, I ring the hotel front desk three times to extend my late checkout pass. I never make it to Day Two of the conference. I only just make it home. I am deeply embarrassed. Not only is this undignified, it is also bad for street cred. Usually I can take my alcohol. Now at every dinner and conference I attend, people will be goading me into conducting whisky tasting experiments, just to see how many days they can knock me out for. 19 November 2015, 6 pm
We have just listened to a rather disturbing talk about Alzheimer’s Disease. From this I learnt that although I cannot remember why I stood for CIPA President, I still have a great deal to be thankful for because I can at least remember that my favourite drink is a gin and tonic, so my brain has not completely stopped functioning, only the bits to do with CIPA. I retreat to my hotel room and reach for my favourite drink to cheer me up. In the minibar, to my delight, there is a mini-bottle of Brecon Gin. Brecon Gin sounds a little bit special to me. In the circumstances, I cannot not try it. It does indeed taste good, and it is a fitting way to celebrate the fact that I am now exactly six months into my one year presidency. So even though I cannot remember why I stood for President, it doesn’t matter because now I am on my way to not being it any more. I put my feet up and reach for the glossy coffee table brochure which the hotel has considerately left out for me. On the coffee table, of course. The brochure is about all the lovely spa treatments you can get. The type of thing you might try if you were stressed but wanted to be relaxed like the VeePee returning from holiday. Unfortunately, the spa brochure means even less to me than the lectures on biotech patents. What on earth is a “herbal steam temple”? What are “medicinal chakra muds”? Or how about “hot lava shells”? These, apparently, release your “blocked energy”, thus “providing a sense of balance to the entire body and mind”. They also allow you to release quite a bit of financial collateral, providing slightly less of a sense of balance to the credit card account. Or, for an even higher price, higher still at the weekend than midweek because hot lava shells have Special Powers at weekends, you can combine your hot lava shell energy-unblocking experience with a glacial ice therapy, which tackles congestion areas, stimulates the lymphatic system and eliminates toxins. And also makes you feel cold. (You can put your glacial ice therapy straight in my glass of gin therapy, thank you.) The treatment rooms in which you undergo these lymphatically redistributive experiences have “soft ambient lighting” (for which read inadequate numbers of light bulbs and one or two candles); “aromatic scents” (air fresheners); and “luxurious electronic therapy couches” (workstations, surely?). They “ensure total privacy” – which is useful considering you are, by all accounts, wearing little more than a borrowed towelling robe by this point – so that you can feel “rejuvenated, restored, and relieved of all stress”. Perhaps the VeePee actually just came here, and didn’t go to Japan at all? OR you can simply go for a swim. Presumably the pool is also full of luxurious, sensual, toxin-releasing, rebalansifying marine energy sources. And for these prices, there would have to be dolphins in there too. It must be possible, I think, to unblock your blocked energy without having to sell your kids to raise the capital. I finish my gin and head off for dinner. 19 November 2015, 3 pm
For the first time ever, I am at the annual Life Sciences Conference. This is almost as good as the main CIPA Congress, but better attended and with a lower entrance fee, the two facts being potentially related. People come back to this conference year after year, to meet with old friends and exchange news about mitochondrial DNA, telomeres and pluripotency. I try to look as though I understand the presentations. I don’t, of course. I have no idea what nucleotides and primers are, or why you can have a certain percentage of homology and still get away with it, and I have a great deal of sympathy with the Australian courts which have apparently just decided that DNA sequences are not molecules at all, they are just pieces of code, which means they are effectively pretty much like computer programs, because they have no effect until you put them into cells like computer programs have no effect until you put them into computers, and so nucleotides must be unpatentable after all. Quite right. You should only be able to patent proper molecules with hexagons in them. Or perhaps I have misunderstood. After lunch there is a speaking slot which is affectionately known, to those of us who often get asked to speak in it, as the Graveyard Slot. My job in today’s Graveyard Slot is to provide a ten minute update about CIPA. I am imagining how keen the delegates are likely to be, straight after their lunch, to hear an update about a Chartered Institute from someone who doesn’t know a nuclease from a protease. So I feel I have nothing to lose. And I lose it manfully by doing a pirate-themed talk which is only a little way short of a pantomime sketch. I wave a plastic cutlass, I put on a thick Wess Curntry accent, and I talk about the narrrsty poyrrrates that can be seen from the crow’s nest of The Good Ship CIPA. As in Cardiff last week, I tell the audience about The Rocks of Referendum and Das Gute Schiff Rumtopf and the IPReg patrol boat called The Happy Heap. But because people just looked bored about that in Cardiff last week, I liven things up by rummaging through my bag for props. I draw out: my Presidential eye patch (which allows me, I say, to turn a blind eye to the overproof rum); my Presidential beard (which allows me, I say, to turn up to Council meetings incognito and actually get my views heard); my pirate treasure; my pirate bottle of rum; and quite a lot of straw. Oh, and a copy of the CIPA Strategic Plan. These props come from diverse sources: a dressing-up box, Amazon®, Mr Davies’s local pet shop, my wardrobe and the CIPA stationery cupboard. No prizes for guessing which is which. During my talk, people laugh a lot. I’m not sure you should laugh at your Institute President, but on the plus side, at least they are still awake at the end of the Graveyard Slot. I gather up the fallen bits of straw, so that the lectern isn’t too messy for the next speaker, and return to my seat to pretend to understand proteases. 18 November 2015, 4 pm
The VeePee is back from a long holiday in Japan. He comes in to CIPA to find out what’s been going on lately. He looks far too relaxed for my liking. I tell him what’s been going on, through gritted teeth. He says he thinks perhaps we’ve been over-complicating things. 18 November 2015, 6 pm I leave the VeePee to be relaxed in a meeting about pro bono work. Me, I am off to a seminar on IP and ethics. There is nothing relaxing about that. Ethics is an interesting, but also a difficult, topic. To my simple little brain, it is a landscape of ever-shifting sands. Because what you regard as acceptable, ethically, seems to depend on many variables:
18 November 2015, 11 am
We are planning next year’s webinar schedule. And to do this, we are trialling a brand new, state-of-the-art project management technique. It involves seven blank sheets of paper labelled January to July, spread out in the middle of the table. On the sheets of paper, using a special tool called a Pen, we write the names of the webinars we are going to run in the relevant months, for instance “Something about trade marks” and “Commercial stuff”. It seems to work, this new technique. Before long, we have webinars planned for at least the first 26 weeks of 2016. Mr Davies is pleased about this, because without webinars not only do patent attorneys become ignorant but also CIPA becomes poor. We move on to discussing a brand new, state-of-the-art scheme for CIPA members to sign up for the webinars. It involves paying a fixed amount at the start of the year and then not having to worry about paying for any more webinars until the next year. We expect this to be popular because you will not have to keep grovelling to your line manager or your finance department every time you want to do a webinar, you will just sign up for FREE. And at the end of the year, CIPA could provide you with a personalised CPD log showing all the free webinars you’d attended, which would be good if IPReg were to ask you how you’d spent your spare time recently. This is of course a great idea. And all we need to make it work is a fully functional database and a web portal for booking onto webinars, and the database must be able to talk to the web portal. Oh ha ha ha. There have been one or two teeny weeny setbacks with the new CIPA website. Like, links not linking. Like, pages not being there. The developers say: We have done our bit; if you want us to come back and do it properly you will have to pay extra. What Mr Davies says next can’t be printed. Possibly it is in Welsh. |
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