The trainee program is over and the twelve of us who started more than seven months ago have spent some time out in the offices getting a feel of what this trade is all about. With at least a few years of experience from research and development work at excellent companies I would like to claim that my previous experience allows me to state that being a patent attorney is a trade dissimilar to a vast majority of engineering jobs that are out on the market. There is a particular skill set required, which makes it very difficult to practice this trade if you figuratively were to be dropped behind enemy lines, as is sometimes the case in engineering. This trade requires not only engineering skills and knowledge of patent law and convention, but also the difficult knowledge of how to put this into better practice, something which is not suitable for learning as you go along. Indeed, the challenge is that there are so many possible modes of practice and that the result of a practitioner’s labor will be put to test by skilled opponents who will deliberately and thoroughly search for any weaknesses.
The trainee program contains the building blocks for a solid foundation of this skill set. A lot of hard work has been required to absorb the knowledge and to deliver the tasks given to us. And several late evenings were spent hammering out texts that would be closely scrutinized by our experienced senior attorneys. Quite similar to how carefully apprentices’ work are reviewed by masters of a trade.
With a long and rigorous education I feel confident that Awapatent has provided us with a solid enough base to take some pride in our work and I think that this is proved by the realization that in the last theory period I learned as much from the thoughts and comments of my fellow trainees as from our senior colleagues.
Peter Kollegger, Associate
