15% more tonic -- or just another bubble?

Is there finally a genuine and measurable pick-up in the market for jobs in law?  No, say the earnest youngsters (and not-so-youngsters) who keep sending out those CVs, filling in online applications and asking this blogger to write them references.  But perhaps they are the unlucky ones since there is some suggestion that things are improving -- in the British market at any rate.  Recruitment agents Robert Walters (53 offices spanning 24 countries, in case you're planning to go into exile) have issued a media release stating that the sun is shining on 15% more applicants than six months ago.  According to the media release (in relevant part):

Rise in job levels by 15% boosts both private practice and in-house markets 

... The UK legal jobs market has benefited from a healthy influx of activity over the past six months ...

Within private practice there has been a significant increase in job levels across real estate finance, private equity, intellectual property [so, we are one of the top four areas of growth] and restructuring. These trends have been driven in part through recruitment activity by new boutiques and US law firms offering market-leading remuneration packages and greater levels of responsibility [Some clarification is needed here. Boutiques ]have to be pretty well established to be able to offer 'market-leading remuneration packages' -- but all boutiques and small firms can offer 'greater levels of responsibility', which range from 'do your own filing' to 'eat what you kill'].

Within in-house, lawyers with financial services experience are receiving a number of offers and market leading salary packages as the impact of new regulations starts to bite. Demand outside of the capital has been boosted as businesses seek to cut costs by relocating some functions away from London [this sentence could quite plausibly have been written in 1983, 1993 or 2003. Does nothing change?].

The news supports the findings of the latest Robert Walters European Jobs Index, which indicates that burgeoning market activity generated a 14.9% increase in legal vacancies advertised in the UK between the first and second quarters of 2013. ...  

The legal market update can be found online here.

All this can mean one of a number of things, including the following: (i) the bad times are over, (ii) a lot of people have given up their IP careers and are being replaced, (iii) law firms are stocking up with suitably qualified staff ahead of their own anticipated pick-up in the economy.  The choice is yours.

GSK Legal Disability Confidence Day

A little advert in the latest supplement to the CIPA Journal caught my attention. Glaxo SmithKline are organising an event on 2nd  October 2013 at their office in Great West Road Brentford TW8 9GS.

They say "the purpose of the event is to give attendees an overview of working at GSK in the in-house legal team, which includes solicitors and patent attorneys. You will gain a better understanding of in-house and law firm recruitment practices. The aim is also to increase awareness of disability within the GSK legal function.

This event is aimed at disabled students with a legal or scientific background, trainees, qualified solicitors, patent attorneys and others to whom the topic is of relevance."
For further information and to register it set to attend you are invited to email UK.disabilityconfidence@GSK.com

Educated, qualified and experienced -- but held back by client expectations?

The Lawyer, Thursday, 29 August 2013, ran this little piece which, if nothing else, shows that it's not only IP bloggers who have to scratch around for content during the long, slow summer months:

Hands up, who did a law degree?

Here is an interesting statistic for you: the number of people making a change of career mid-stream is on the up. In 2009, 14 per cent of students enrolled on the graduate diploma in law conversion course at the University of Law were career changers. Three years on and this figure has risen to 20 per cent.

We spoke to four 'career changers' over the summer, including former Blur drummer David Rowntree who is now a solicitor with Kingsley Napley and former A&E nurse Jennifer Bethlehem who is currently working at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, to find out how they got on after choosing law as a second career.

Little did we know what a hornet's nest we had wandered into. TheLawyer.com has been flooded with comments, some of you are outraged that you can become a lawyer without first doing a law degree.

One commentator opined: “Lawyers seem to be allowing for the destruction of their own profession by allowing any old person to come along and proclaim, indeed be, a lawyer.” Another suggests career changers must be interested in the law itself rather than “money, prestige and ego”, if they are going to be successful.

We've also heard from mothers who have taken career breaks before converting to law at a mature age and encountered no difficulty in making the change or indeed landing a job.

We have a shrinking profession attempting to be more diverse in its makeup. Is the biggest hurdle to diversification lawyers themselves? Let us know what you think.

IP practitioners in England and Wales, which is this blogger's home turf,  are already educationally and professionally diversified to a remarkable extent.  There are conventionally legally-educated qualified solicitors and barristers, then there are cross-overs who start as one and end up as the other, taking with them not only the education that led to their earlier qualification but also the attitudes and hang-ups.  Less conventional are those who studied another subject at university first, tacking law on as an uncomfortably intensive afterthought.  There are also patent attorneys, with what should be an in-depth scientific background, and trade mark attorneys (the mongrels of the IP world with no discernible common ancestor or pedigree).  But this fairly diverse scene is only the beginning of the story: there are private practitioners, in-housers -- drawn both from the ranks of those mentioned in the previous paragraph and from those who have worked in the granting and challenging of IP rights, being patent or trade mark examiners.

I'm pretty certain that IP lawyers are not the biggest barrier to their own diversification. If there is a barrier at all, it might be provided by client expectations that the professional representative of its choice will conform to a stereotype that may be unrealistic and may indeed no longer exist.

Best ... and worst?

In the past week or two this blogger has spent a fair bit of time talking to friends and colleagues, one of whom is considering shuttling away from an academic career and setting up as a sole intellectual property consultant, while the other is pondering a move from a large firm to a small practice. In each case the person concerned has been assuming that "the grass is greener on the other side", not least because the career move under consideration is one based on escaping from an unhappy position rather than taking a positive step towards a desired goal.

These discussions set this blogger thinking: what words of comfort or caution might the readers of SOLO IP have for anyone thinking of taking the plunge? Suggestions are very welcome!

Blissful Solitude

The IP Section of the Law Society Library

It is often suggested that it is better to work in communal spaces rather than alone. Some of the most freely available communal spaces naturally include libraries and if you are a solicitor, you are entitled to use the Law Society library. I had reason to paddle down there today and was surprised by how quiet it was. Therefore, there was no difficulty in accessing the single copy of the White book and if I had been brave enough to seek access to the idle terminals, no doubt I could have seen even more. While the library is the most work-related, the building at 113 Chancery Lane offers all sorts of other coffee and catering delights as well as meeting rooms. They are so under used by Solicitors they have to be offered to the paying public for events.
If you cannot get to Chancery Lane the services of the lonely librarian are still available to you at the end of a phone or email.

From Portal Tax to Portaloo? Relief may be in the offing ...

"Solicitors could claim back tens of thousands of pounds in tax using capital allowances, but must do it by April 2014" is the exciting title of a circular which this blogger has recently received from Portal Tax. From this release, it appears that

If your practice isn't
flush for cash, why
let the taxman get it? 

" ... The [UK] 2012 Finance Bill [which appears to have been an Act since June 2012] introduced a transitional period which runs until April 2014. If a commercial property is sold within this period then it can be treated in the same way it would have been previously. Before April 2012 you could choose when, and whether, you made a capital allowances claim on your business. The owner does not have to make a claim for capital allowances before he/she concludes the transaction, but they will have to agree to the fixed value requirement within 2 years. The next time the property is sold, even if it is the very next day, then the new rules apply and capital allowances must be considered as if it were post April 2014.

If the current owner acts now they can claim the full capital allowances back for themselves. If they do nothing, a future owner of the property may benefit instead. Portal Tax has helped businesses to maximise any capital allowance claims on their commercial property - on average, £105,000 for each business in outstanding capital allowance for items ranging from fire alarm systems, to heating, to air conditioning.

Data compiled by Portal Tax has revealed the top ten items by volume on which tax has been claimed back.

1 Ironmongery (including closers, latches, locks, etc)

2 Sanitary ware (including WCs [no doubt providing relief in more than one sense of the word ...], basins, second fix pipework etc.)

3 Power, Data and Lighting Fittings (including sockets, switches etc.)

4 Floor Finishes (including carpet, vinyl sheet etc.)

5 Hot and Cold Water Equipment (including pipework, tanks etc.)

6 Signage

7 Wall Finishes (such as ceramic tile splashbacks)

8 Fire, Communication and Security Systems (such as alarms, cameras, other equipment)

9 Heating, Cooling and Ventilation systems (including air conditioning, radiators, boilers etc.)

10 Workplace Lighting (usage dependent)

Portal Tax estimates that 96% of businesses that own their own properties, or commercial property owners, could be owed a refund. ... In one case allowances worth as much as 68% of the purchase price were found. ...”

There's nothing to suggest that these attractions and advantages are open to solicitors only; one rather hopes and imagines that patent and trade mark attorneys, IP consultants, innovation gurus and the like would equally qualify for these tax breaks.  There may be a considerable number of readers of this blog who own and may be disposing of their work premises, particularly those who work at home or in that cosy shed at the bottom of the garden.  They may also be deterred from maximising their tax efficiency for any number of reasons, including

• the cost of their accountant's services
• inability to understand more than about one word in every ten that their accountant says to them
• time spent dealing with accountants is time spent not dealing with clients
• the cost of complying with the accountant's insatiable demand for miscellaneous pieces of paper and information before they can even find out whether the tax relief adds up to more than whatever their accountant charges them
• the nervous strain, tension, pain and suffering of having to deal with their accountant

and so on.  But seriously, if there is any benefit to be derived, this avenue of relief is surely worth exploring.

Where Charity really begins ...

Many are the times this blogger (the son of a partner in a two-man practice) has heard legal practitioners come out with complaints about the reluctance of clients to pay, and indeed the expectation on the part of clients that, if they're not troubling their professional adviser too much, there's no need to pay.  On the one side the dialogue contains lines like: "Can I just ask you a quick question? It won't take you a minute to answer", or "To save us both the hassle of having to meet in person, I've just received this email and I'm not sure what it means: can I just read it out to you over the phone so you can clarify it for me ...".  On the other side, there's the classic: "What does he take me for --  a **** (insert number of asterisks corresponding to the preferred adjectival epithet) charity?"

Well, some clients do regard their legal representatives as charities --  for the very good reason that they are. This in turn raises the question whether the serried ranks of solo and small-scale IP practitioners should not also be giving serious consideration to the use of a charity as all or part of their business model.  After all, patent attorneys see more than they'd like from impecunious inventors and underfunded entrepreneurs, while struggling artists, composers, musicians, designers, dramatic performers and authors have spread their favours widely across the various IP professions over the past decades, with the latter often having little to show for it.

Incorporating the practice as a charity: saves all those
headaches about divvying up the partnership profits!

Anyway, from a recent Law Society Gazette post, "Charity sets up its own law practice", the following appears, in relevant part:

"A Leicester charity has become the first such not-for-profit organisation to set up and own a law firm. Castle Park Solicitors was set up as a community interest company with the help of National Lottery funding by local charity the Community Advice and Law Service.

The firm was set up to provide employment, immigration and family services to people ... who before this year’s legal aid cuts would have been eligible for public funding. It also offers mediation and collaborative law services.  ...

In the long term, any profits from the firm will be returned to the charity to support free advice in other areas of social welfare law.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority granted a special waiver of the separate business rules to the Community Advice and Law Service allowing it to set up Castle Park Solicitors.

Christine Palmer ..., employment solicitor at the firm, said: ‘Castle Park is run as a business separately to the charity with the same financial pressures that most law firms face today [Well, that rather reduces the appeal of this business model]. We have an ethical ethos [One rather hopes that all professional service suppliers do]. Unfortunately we cannot give the service for nothing but we have set our rates very competitively. Our aim is to help those people who can no longer get legal aid and simply cannot afford to pay for full private legal services' ...".

Does ownership by a charity, or even turning one's practice into one, have anything to commend it to the IP practitioner? Let's hear from you!