Education and training of patent attorneys

I am taking it for granted that we all believe education and training to be a good thing. Who amongst us would disagree that our people should be educated and trained to the highest possible standards?

But I am here to deliver bad news for our industry. We are failing our students and in doing so we are failing our profession. It will be to the detriment of us all if attitudes and practices do not change – and soon.

Too much of the training in this profession is left to the enthusiasm of the students. They badger us to give lectures and make us commit to being tutors. We are amateurish and have been told by Professor Sherr to buck up.

Part of the Professor’s message is that we are all individually and collectively responsible and we must improve for all our sakes. From my vantage point, I see absence of collective effort and I see more that each of us can and should do. We must not kid ourselves that the examinations are the be all and end all. Our profession as a whole must continue to train and improve itself to remain competitive. We are looking for people to take part more actively in the education project, and I have some warnings and then some encouragement for us all.

Employers must beware. There is an increase in movement of people within the profession, which doesn’t appear to be solely about the desire for more money. Other factors are now as important, such as whether an employer provides decent training, cares for its trainees and offers a variety of work; rather than having an ethos directed only at this year’s profits.

Students must beware. We’ve known how taxing the JEB examinations have been over the past years. Has anyone looked carefully at the most recent EQE pass rates? Take it from me, they are low: the pass rate for those sitting the examination in full (including modular sitting) in 2003 is just 29.4% and for those resitting the examination in part is only 28.0%. As students, are you getting enough training? And are you committing enough time to acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to pass?

Guardians of the UK profession must beware. “We have the key skills”, we cry. But, today’s business world presents us with competition from further and further afield. We must not lose our reputation for excellence. At the same time we must keep an eye on our rivals and retain value as a key feature of our services. Note to JEB: value-for-money is not currently a feature of the P2 syllabus; perhaps it should be.

Tutors must beware. If you have been kind enough to put down your name on the offer-to-act-as-a-tutor form, will the students really thank you for providing an expansive monologue on mid-1980’s practice before the UK Patent Office or on the intricacies of the EPC ignoring the case law that has arisen since you passed the examinations yourself? I don’t think it is good enough any more to say “Well, this is how I passed”.

I urge us all to sit up ever so slightly and each do our little bit. Here are some starters.

Employers need not simply go out and pay for their trainees to attend external courses, though the CIPA-organised seminars are tremendously good value. In-house informal meetings are an excellent way of distributing the knowledge and experience of an individual amongst the rest of the team, whatever its size. How often is it the case that the patent attorney in the office next door to yours does not know anything of the recent EPO-hearing/latest killer inventive step argument/priority claim issue you have just been through? Take practical steps to share knowledge.

Most of us will accept that the majority of our work is relatively straightforward. What happens, however, when an unusual item arrives at the office? Is this routinely dealt with by the senior attorney or the person who did it last time or is it distributed amongst those who are known not to have come across that issue before? It doesn’t take much management to share out the unusual. We know that success in the examinations requires candidates to deal competently with a wide variety of real (and not-so-real) life scenarios. It makes a world of difference in the P2 paper (and also to real-life practice) if you are answering a question based on an issue you have actually dealt with, rather than relying upon your reading of the relevant section of the Black Book.

Tutors of P6, I direct you to the IPET-hosted seminar “Training the Trainers - P6” scheduled for Tuesday, 24 February 2004. It is free. And you get lunch. And you will be a better P6 tutor as a result. Other Advanced level papers can then be covered in future. Hurrah!

Students, we will be preparing, through the Short Term Group, guidance for recommended levels of experience in particular skill and knowledge areas for each of the Advanced Level papers. These are to be used to help you judge whether you are in fact ready to take the papers and to indicate areas where there are gaps in your training that could usefully be filled by seminars, tutorials, etc.

We are embarking upon a project of revamping the Informals lectures and I encourage all Fellows, especially those recently qualified, to put themselves forward (or take the call when it comes) to give lectures. This is not an onerous task. The lectures last an hour and there is no better way to improve your expertise on a subject properly than to learn it so that you can lecture on it. You will be educating yourself.

George W Schlich
Chairman, CIPA Education Committee