Explain why you decided to pursue a career in this profession.

Although I enjoyed labs and carrying out my Master’s project, I knew that continuing in academia was not for me – I wanted to learn about a variety of technologies, and I wanted to pursue something entirely new. I chose to become a patent attorney because it would allow me to keep learning about many technologies, whilst exploring a completely new set of skills.

Explain what your current role involves.

Patent attorneys generally work in ‘private practice’ or ‘in-house’. Those working in-house will work in their employer’s legal department, and might work mainly with a specific type of technology or a few technologies applicable to a certain class of products. I’m in a private practice, and therefore work for a variety of clients.

I’m lucky to work with a breadth of technologies, including medical devices, autonomous vehicles, offshore wind, HVAC, fire detection, aircraft, and many more. What I work on can change as cases come back around during examination, or depending on my clients’ commercial activities. It always keeps me on my toes!

As a patent attorney, you will develop skills relating to drafting and examining patent applications, possibly litigating patents, and you will have a good understanding of patent law. There’s lots of hard work involved in fully qualifying as a patent attorney, but the result has been completely worth it.

My day-to-day work often involves the examining of patent applications, which will have me analyse existing patent documents and submit to a patent office why my client’s own patent application is new and inventive. There’s plenty of critical thinking and written communication involved getting to that point, and I enjoy how focused the work can be.

I also work on a number of more involved, contentious matters. These often relate to how my clients might enforce their own patents against third parties, or how my clients might be impacted by patents belonging to third parties. These cases can be some of the most interesting and challenging, and offer a good opportunity to work closely with the client and my colleagues in reaching the best possible outcome for the client.

Whatever my day might have in store, it’s always engaging!

Any advice

I applied for roles as a trainee patent attorney in my final year of university, and interviewed at a few different places, including Dehns, before choosing to work here. It’s a very competitive application process, so get your application in early and to multiple employers.

If you are interested in becoming a patent attorney, also keep an eye out for summer schemes or internships that firms might offer. Dehns offers a summer scheme, for example, where you can spend a few weeks seeing what being a patent attorney involves.

You should also check out some patents to get an idea of what sort of thing you will be working on. Don’t just go looking for any old patent! Think about something you have an interest in, and go looking from there. There are patents out there for Lego bricks, the first GameBoy, or even making a pair of Levis. You really won’t realise how many things might have a patent for them until you start looking!