Conor joined the Engineering department at Dehns in 2017 as a Technical Assistant. Conor qualified as a European Patent Attorney in 2021 and as a UK Patent Attorney in 2023. He became an Associate in 2023.
Here, Conor highlights a day in the life of an Associate at Dehns.
9.15am – Arrive at the office and switch my PC on
9.20am – I look through any emails that have come in overnight. As we deal with clients from all over the world, I may receive something from attorneys in China or Japan or the US. If there is anything that needs to be dealt with, I will assess urgency and decide if anything needs my immediate attention.
9.45am – If there are any invoices that need my approval, I will check them and approve them for sending as soon as I can. Often, they are processed overnight, so I will handle these in the morning as well.
10.00am – Fill up my water bottle and then water my plants on my windowsill 🙂
10.05am – I have a checklist of various things that need my attention that will have carried over from the day before, and I will have decided which of those I should be attending to next. I recently received an Examination Report from a foreign attorney, so I assess the attorney’s comments, consider the Examiner’s objections, and think about how best to address those objections. Then, I begin to write a letter to the client with my advice for how they might want to respond. Every case is unique and what might take an hour for one case might take a day or two of work on another!
11.30am – Refill my water bottle; important to stay hydrated!
11.35am – Instructions have come in for a response to a European Examination Report due later in the week. I don’t want to wait until the deadline date itself to deal with this in case there are any problems that crop up, so I turn my attention to this now. I review the instructions and check that the amendments comply with European practice. I prepare the amendments and the arguments for the response and then send them to my paralegal so that she can prepare the legal forms and upload the response on the filing software.
12.45pm – Break for lunch. We have a common area in the London office that I often sit in for lunch and chat with friends.
1.45pm – I see that my paralegal has emailed me say that she has prepared the forms for that response due later this week. I will then check the forms and hive the response a final look before signing it and passing it to our Records department for filing – it’s a team effort to get things done!
2.15pm – I go back to the earlier case I was working on to finalise and send off my advice letter to the client
3.30pm – I look through my task list and deadlines to see what I should tackle next. I see that I have a client meeting later next week that I should do some preparation for. It seems that they want me to advise on the activity of a competitor and how a new patent application belonging to the competitor might affect my client’s activities. It doesn’t feel particularly heavy to pick that up at this time of the afternoon, so I dive into some investigation work to round off my afternoon.
5.30pm – Just before I log off, I take a look at what’s still on my task list and decide what I should pick up in the morning tomorrow.
