PhD Boost....for getting a job

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had two interesting conversations last week that provided some concrete information on what it means to have a chemistry PhD in the legal market. The PhD patent attorney I talked to gave a couple of examples of how having a PhD has been an advantage for her. Firms like having PhD's. They're good for business. On a more personal level, she mentioned that working with clients is much easier when you have a PhD. The real meat of the discovery is more obvious to somebody with a research background than somebody with a bachelor's degree. What she said is even more rare for patent lawyers, are PhD's with real research experience. Understanding how the research process works makes it much easier to work with other research scientists.

All of these advantages, while great, don't amount to much if you can't find a job. Fortunately, it sounds like technical people have a distinct advantage over the larger body of law students when it comes to finding a job. Getting a summer position after completing 1L is talked about like some kind of holy grail type of quest, but I was told that patent types are the ones who usually end up with those positions. It makes sense. If there are a decent number of positions with nobody around to fill them, it's going to be easier to find one of those positions. If there is a position that any law student can fill, the competition will be much more intense. There are also plenty of firms looking for patent attorneys. At GMU, about a third of the firms that do OCI are looking for patent associates. There seems to be more of a applicants market for patent attorneys, at least based on my initial conversation. I'm going to keep following up to get a better idea of the state of the patent job market, but I have to confess that things seem much better than I had anticipated.