Pete Fellows' latest piece on employment in the patent attorney profession makes interesting reading. In "Electronics Patent Attorneys No Longer Grow On Trees But They Might Be Hiding In Giant Haystacks" (
here), he suggests that a pre-recessionary state of affairs has apparently re-emerged:
"Towards the end of 2009 and through the beginning of last year, I noticed a very unfamiliar trend. That was, for the first time in a very long time, there were more patent attorneys with a technical background in electronics looking for work than there were jobs.
That was short-lived.
In an absolute reverse of where we stood in February 2010, there are now many more jobs than there are people for them. The options for electronics patent attorneys are myriad and there is certainly no shortage of firms clambering over each other to find a new a recruit in this area.
However the picture is not necessarily as simple as it might sound. There do remain some difficulties for this now coveted category of Patent Attorney. ...
It might be easy to move private practices but getting a job in industry is still extremely difficult.... The problem is that there are quite a lot of Attorneys who do fancy moving but are not particularly interested in another private practice. These are the people that seem to appear from nowhere when an industry position arises. Salaries for industry positions are nowhere near what they were (and getting a bonus of any size can be arbitrary at best; as difficult as mowing the lawn with nail clippers at worst) and hence added to the tough competition for in-house positions is a need to compromise on earning potential far more than many are prepared to stomach....
It’s also not necessarily easy for Attorneys who either are, or nearly are Partners and wish to move to a competing firm. There has been an apparent and brutally quick upturn in work across the electronics sector but practices themselves are in many cases still suffering from at least two years of economic uncertainty. This has a few implications: 1) Equity Partners are less interested in reducing their own share of the pot; 2) Firms are less interested therefore in hiring attorneys that might be banging down the door for partnership; 3) This has meant that the surge in demand is really only at part qualified, newly qualified and recently qualified levels. Having a client following does help circumvent the politics to some extent, although as getting work in electronics is not really the problem for many firms it is far less attractive than one might think ....."
Do readers of this weblog agree with this analysis?
