| My office mate and good friend of many years is a patent agent. He was/is industrial/electronic/radio but then pursued patent agent 100% for a while. Ultimately he came back to tech, but acts as a sort of front line patent agent for our company as well. We have many discussions about the inanity of the whole system. I’m an idealist, he’s more of a realist about it. It exists. If nothing else, we participate from a defensive posture. He has shared that he kind of likes the game of patents. You have an idea, which you then have to represent/express/model in a language that looks like English but isn’t exactly that has its own set of rules and idioms. Or in short, it can be seen a lot like the software we write. While he likes it as a sort of variety, he seems to like it about 20%, and when the workload goes above that much commitment, the complaining starts and the desire to get back to “the real work we do” begins to be expressed. When I have asked him why he doesn’t do more of it, he has shared the same observation others have shared here: Agent is a great skill to have to broaden your value, attorney is what you want to do if you want to earn lots of money at it. On that note, we both observe that the foundation of lawyering is to be in contention with someone, and generally speaking the less contention among people, the better. Someone’s gotta do it apparently, but it’s not a sphere of happiness. |