Penguinick said:
I'm a 12th grader in California and I'm considering Patent Attorney as a career goal. I have a few questions:
1. Would it be more useful to have an undergraduate degree in Biology or Bioengineering?
2. What does a patent attorney spend most of his/her time doing?
3. Just how important are "people skills?" Leadership skills? Public speaking skills?
4. Do any personality traits make certain people better suited to the profession than others?
5. Is there a ladder of jobs to climb to become a patent attorney?
6. How useful is fluency in Spanish?
Thanks
First off, "patent attorney" usually means someone who is both a) licensed to practice before th US Patent and Trademark Office, and b) spends most of their time trying to get patents issued for their clients, otherwise known as patent prosecution. Other attorneys may not prosecute patents, but may instead get involved in other practices related to patents, such as patent litigation, or patent licensing, etc. For the sake of this discussion, I will assume you want to to patent prosecution, because that's typically what a "patent attorney" does.
1. Would it be more useful to have an undergraduate degree in Biology or Bioengineering?
All things being equal, probably bioengineering. However, all things are not really equal, and here's why. You are young -- when you get into college, you may decide that you like being a scientist better than anything else, and decide after you get your BS to go to grad school instead of law school. So, unless you are 100% dead set on being a patent lawyer, it's probably unwise to base youre major decision solely on what you might want to do for a living 7+ years down the road.
Second, the law is very prestige-oriented, even for patent lawyers. All other things being equal, it's easier to get a job out of law school if you go to a "better" law school (better having different meanings depending on the context, but usually meaning "higher ranked" in the law school rankings), and it is easier to get into a better law school if you have good grades. Science and engineering majors are notorious for being difficult to achieve a high GPA in -- if law school is your goal, you'll want to pick a major that you enjoy so that you maximize your chances of getting the highest possible GPA/
That said, if you want to do patent law, you will need a science or engineering degree, or at least several years of advanced math (calculus and beyond), chemistry and physics to be qualified to take the examination to be a patent attorney.
2. What does a patent attorney spend most of his/her time doing?
Interviewing inventors, drafting patent applications and the associated paperwork, responding to "office actions" (communications from the USPTO about an application), working with clients to develop their patent portfolio, advising litigators or providing litigation support in patent infringement cases, that sort of stuff. It's a lot of paperwork. If you don't like working alone on projects, and doing a lot of writing, and learning about unfamiliar technologies under time pressure, you won't enjoy patent prosecution.
3. Just how important are "people skills?" Leadership skills? Public speaking skills?
"People skills" are important in any job -- you'll always have clients and coworkers to communicate with. Leadership skills are probably not so important, especially at first, and public speaking skills are probably only important if you want to give presentations, which some attorney do but many don't. As a patent prosecuter, you very likely won't ever be in court.
4. Do any personality traits make certain people better suited to the profession than others?
The most satisfied prosecuters seem to be people with strong technical backgrounds, who enjoy working independently without a lot of interaction with other coworkers. That's not to say that they are antisocial, just that patent prosecution is really a solitary type of practice -- you don't have teams of attorneys working on an application, it's invariably just one attorney at a time, even if you are working at a large law firm. Oh, there will be meetings, and sometimes you will go to a coworker for advice, or to proofread something, or just to talk, but prosecution itself is generally a solitary type of practice.
5. Is there a ladder of jobs to climb to become a patent attorney?
Not really. Just like any other attorney, you have to have an undergrad degree, you have to go to law school and get a JD, you have to pass a state bar examination, and you have to qualify for (by having a technical BS degree, usually) and pass the USPTO Examiner's test (the "patent bar"). Once you do all that, you are a licensed patent attorney. Some patent attorneys work for large, general-practice law firms, many work for specialty law firms that specialize in intellectual property or even kjust patent prosecution, many work for companys that patent their inventions (like Intel or GE), many work on their own. It just depends on your own interests and options.
Although there aren't really any employment prerequisites, many patent attorneys have either graduate education in their field or work experience prior to becoming patent lawyers. Although a fair number of patent lawyers went straight from undergrad to law school, many patent lawyers have advanced degrees (PhD's are especially common amongst patent attorneys with biology and chemistry degrees, MS degrees are common across the board, however most electrical and mechanical engineers only have a BS degree), and many patent attorneys have some work experience as engineers or scientists before they went to law school. However, none of these things are a requirement to become a patent attorney.
EDIT: As far as the language thing goes, any foreign language is better than none, but Spanish is not going to be that big of a deal, and any language is going to be much less important for a patent attorney than your technical background. However, language skills can be a plus, but if you are looking for a language to learn, Chinese or Japanese will probably be the best.
