This article is written for law students and lawyers-in-training who are looking for specialized legal jobs, to give you an insight into intellectual property law. It will attempt to give you a very general overview of an exciting and demanding area of law, and the prospects for employment and legal jobs within this sector.
Intellectual property law covers the full range of technology and the arts, from records to computer programs. Intellectual property law is the area of law that includes patent law, copyright law, and trademark law, along with some aspects of other branches of law, such as licensing and unfair competition.
Recent times have witnessed an explosion in the field of intellectual property and lawyer jobs in this area. Even as other markets for legal practice services are hit by the recession, demand for intellectual property attorney jobs generally remains high. As long as people invent or create, there is a need for intellectual property attorneys to protect and enforce intellectual property rights.
There are certain areas of the country that have a higher concentration of companies working on Intellectual Property. Any area with a high volume of technology companies or companies in the pharmaceutical sector tends to have legal practices that support the IP function.
The Thames Valley area around Oxford and Reading, Cambridge and London are hotbeds for Intellectual Property law. The practice is a people-oriented profession. The attorney works with a wide range of clients, from small business owners to senior management officials of large corporations.
For many companies, obtaining intellectual property protection is a critical step in an integrated business. The timing of the grant of protection affects a company’s marketing, sales, personnel practices, and research and development efforts. The process of obtaining protection brings the attorney into close working contact with professionals in many business areas.
Intellectual property law provides a unique opportunity to use a degree or previous professional experience with the practice of law. In fact, those who combine a background in medicine, chemistry or technology with the legal profession are highly sought after.
Many companies hire intellectual property attorneys as in-house counsel. These attorneys develop an expertise in the technology of their corporations and are often closely involved in business decisions related to the protection of intellectual property and other related matters. This can provide the lawyer with a greater sense of contribution to the business and greater satisfaction in seeing their role having an effect on its overall success.
Many law firms across the UK have become niche specialists in intellectual property law. Also large general practice firms will tend to have legal departments. Working within private practice will often give a lawyer a wider variety of work and this can be both adversarial and non-adversarial in nature.
The overall workload may be higher in private practice and billing targets must be met, so this route can be quite demanding.
There are a number of different paths open to intellectual property attorneys and it allows each person to choose the practice that best suits that person’s overall goals.
