CIPA consultation on CPD

CIPA Education Committee have produced a document which is fulsomely described as a Framework for Professional Development. They want our comments on it by 10 March 2017 so do jump to it - they clearly need help. I had hoped it was going to propose the end of the CPD hours culture in favour of results, but no.

The idea seems to be that they need to know what a qualified patent agent needs to learn in order to develop and maintain his professional competence. This will guide the educational provision.

Once one has got over the "Teach Speak Jargon", we find that they believe we need to have skills, knowledge, values and behaviours. I accept that skills and knowledge can be learned taught and developed, but I am not too sure about the last two. Once upon a time lawyers studied ethics which generally dealt with the practicalities of not acting for both sides in an argument and managing the clients funds but such practical issues don't seem to be within the scope of this framework. Least said about "behaviours" the better.

Let me turn to what I do understand. There are lists of skills and lists of knowledge.

At the end of the list on knowledge we have:

2(g) a member should have a sound understanding of the law and practice as it relates to designs, trade marks, copyright, licensing, due diligence, contract and competition law to enable them to identify the implications of such laws and practice for clients and to enable them to refer clients for further professional advice and guidance as relevant and appropriate

Frankly this narrow focus on patent practice is disappointing. Now that CITMA has its charter are we dropping our interest in the core intellectual property fields of trademarks, designs and copyright? I think we need to put Mr Ferrara right.

The list of skills is extremely flowery. Some are the basic drafting skills that are a prerequisite for qualification. Other so-called skills are frankly patronising : do you want to be trained in how to "be able to adapt style and approach to meet the needs of clients".  One skill that seems to be particularly important is managing the expectations of clients who expect their unadapted applications to be examined any time soon by the EPO or UK IPO.

This list does not provide any suitable structure for developing educational offerings.

When seeking education, focusing on knowledge always helps. The core of the CIPA offering needs to be keeping up to date with developments in IP law in our home jurisdictions. The suggestion that the same level of emphasis needs to be placed on ALL overseas jurisdictions is odd. Its all too easy for CIPA to succumb to visiting overseas' professionals desire to give "marketing" updates in the name of education. Education in the laws and practices of the main trading partners of this country is what we need. We need to direct our eager marketing volunteers into discussing practical issues that are likely to be relevant to our local clients.

Item 2(f) : approaches to competitor IP is not knowledge -its a skill.

The values and behaviours are the province of IPREG and codes of conduct.

An educational framework needs to be more skeletal and be a tool that those organising programmes and events can work with. This framework does not seem likely to help.

We need courses and support on:

• keeping up to date on IP law
• improving  skills of drafting and advocacy for preempting and responding to office actions
• developing litigation skills
• listening and receiving feedback from users of IP on what they need
• managing our own businesses - includes ethics

What do you think you need CIPA to provide for you?

Dear President of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys

Andrea Brewster CIPA VP and Catriona Hammer, President

After the excitement of the CIPA elections, it is time to learn what we can expect of the new Presidency.

Our new President works full time for a large  corporate  GE Healthcare  so the three priorities she highlights in her address (printed in the CIPA Journal for May which may eventually appear online here but is briefly noted now on her CIPA  profile) are influenced by that personal agenda. They are:

• Developing best practises in areas such as governance, compliance and diversity (the Duck says this is so not relevant to a Solo practitioner. I can't do diversity and I hardly need a policy to demonstrate that I don't take bribes. I do happily sign all the documents that say I won't buy coffee for anyone employed by a compliant client. These seem to be required by larger clients but I don't see that they do much for the profession.)
• Policy contributions on the UPC and Rules of Procedure (the Duck comments that elsewhere in the Journal  the Chief Executive reports criticism by Mr Justice Birss of the profession's apathy and subdued response to the Rules. When the rules of representation were being discussed I was unable to influence CIPA to back my proposal as they prefer to aim for the hopeless case of having all CIPA Fellows grandfathered in, so frankly for most CIPA Fellows the UPC is remote and a threat rather than an opportunity and I need to remain a Solicitor to participate)
• Education (the Duck says that would be good if it were focused on competence. I did ask my Institute to offer assistance in advocacy skills development but the proposal has been rejected in a silent way. CIPA have just announced a re-run course for September to encourage just 30 delegates to participate in a case study course at luxurious Missenden Abbey for over £1k: price to be announced on Monday. One thing that I learned on my Higher Rights course was that the case study is a tool and not the main focus. If you have a study that relates to your area of expertise, delegates retire to their comfort zone and spend time considering the specific facts of the study in the light of their expertise in the law of added subject matter or obviousness and fail to focus on the litigation skills. )

So what does the membership need from the Institute? Firstly it needs the Council to focus on representing rather than preaching. Ensuring competence is vital but so is ensuring that the Profession is delivering what the market needs. At the moment my perception is that the profession serves the needs of the large corporate fairly well (well that's the profitable bit) but we are leaving the access to IP awareness to the UK IPO - who are doing a sterling job.

To that end I would like to see tools developed to allow members to test their competence in core areas with a view to helping us work on competence. As a Solo practitioner it is difficult to know whether you are as up to speed on claim drafting or EPO rules of procedure, CPR as as you need to be. In my experience we all have to be very self-confident as our larger colleagues seeking work from our clients are all too willing to allege incompetence. Nevertheless keeping up to date with practice is vital. What we don't want is someone to tell us about individual cases. We can read. What we need is analysis and extraction of the relevant lessons that can be put into practice. If the Institute does Education well it would be worth it and the rest would follow. It should not be in third place.

Enough of my bitter wanderings. What do you want from your Institute.  Let them hear it, please

Sally Cooper rants on Issues In IP Educational Programs

As someone whose CV includes being a Senior Lecturer at The College of Law (now the proudly-named University of Law), a publication with the title “IP education of non IP professionals” necessarily attracts 

Tailored Tuition

attention

In its Final Thoughts (so at the end of the page) there’s the conclusion that “The importance of IP education cannot be stated enough” : so say all of us ! 

However, the (negative) issues that command attention for those of us involved in spreading the word about the benefits of IP (and is any one of us not so engaged ?) are (without alteration) as follows :

• the content material had not been adjusted to suit the particular audience, 
• too much attention had been given to one particular form of IP, and other forms of IP had been generally ignored, 
• the language used in the training material had not been adjusted to suit a non IP audience who generally have a poor understanding of IP specific words and phrases. 
• the legal aspects of IP dominated the training, 
• the focus was very on one IP particular process rather than explaining all of the key IP processes and how they are inter-related, 
• learnings from how the IP game is played in different industry sectors were not included, 
• all of the case studies or examples provided during the IP education were drawn from one particular industry sub-sector,
• the person providing the IP education lacked a holistic view of the IP world, 
• the course content lacked consistency when implemented across a large organisation or company, 
• the educational material and delivery was dry and un-atractive, and did not really engage the participants, 
• too much emphasis was given to how the IP game is played in one or two jurisdictions, 
• some admin or facilities issues adversely impacted the success of the IP education program, 
• there was no evaluation or follow-up conducted 

It seems to me that the dominant message coming from these (negative) issues is that old familiar : the person asked to provide the education had not been briefed adequately about the concerns of those he / she was being asked to educate. 

I know I can be “dry and un-atractive (sic)” when doing my best to explain “the legal aspects of IP” rather than “the IP game” : but that won’t stop me being involved in IP education and trying to get it right !