Intellectual Property Legal Jobs for Trainee Lawyers

This article is written for law students and trainee lawyers looking for specialized legal jobs, to give you an insight into copyright law. It will attempt to give you a very general overview of an exciting and demanding area of ​​law, and the prospects for employment and legal jobs within this sector.

Intellectual property law covers the full range of technology and the arts, from records to computer software. Intellectual property law is the area of ​​law that includes patent law, copyright law, and trademark law, along with some aspects of other branches of law, such as licensing and unfair competition.

Recent times have witnessed an explosion in the field of intellectual property and lawyer jobs in this area. Even when other markets for law practice services are affected by the recession, the demand for intellectual property lawyer jobs generally remains high. As long as people invent or create, there is a need for intellectual property lawyers to protect and enforce intellectual property rights.

There are certain areas of the country that have a higher concentration of companies that work in Intellectual Property. Any area with a high volume of technology companies or companies in the pharmaceutical sector tends to have legal practices that support the IP function.

The Thames Valley area around Oxford and Reading, Cambridge and London are hot spots for Intellectual Property law. The practice is a people-oriented profession. The attorney works with a wide range of clients, from small business owners to senior management officers of large corporations.

For many companies, obtaining intellectual property protection is a critical step in an integrated business activity. The timing of the grant of protection affects a company’s marketing, sales, personnel practices, and research and development efforts. The process of obtaining protection puts the lawyer in close working contact with professionals in many commercial areas.

Intellectual property law provides a unique opportunity to utilize a degree or prior professional experience with the practice of law. In fact, those people who combine training in medicine, chemistry or technology with law are in high demand.

Many companies hire intellectual property lawyers as internal counsel. These lawyers develop expertise in their corporations’ technology and are often closely involved in business decisions related to intellectual property protection and other related matters. This can give the lawyer a greater sense of contribution to the business and greater satisfaction in seeing their role have an effect on its overall success.

Many law firms across the UK have become niche specialists in intellectual property law. Also large general practice firms will tend to have legal departments. Working within private practice will often give a lawyer a wider variety of work and this can be both adversarial and non-adversarial in nature.

The overall workload can be higher in private practice and billing targets must be met, so this route can be quite demanding.

There are a number of different paths open to intellectual property lawyers and it allows each person to choose the practice that best suits that person’s overall goals.