Archive for category: Patent Bar

The patent bar exam is the biggest step in your journey to becoming a patent attorney or patent agent. In many cases it will also be the last step you need to take to begin your career. Before taking the patent bar examination, you want to be prepared and brimming to the top with all the right information.

The patent bar is a difficult exam. There are bright sides to the exam, like the fact that it’s all multiple choice questions and that you’re allowed to have the MPEP manual by your side while testing. This should help alleviate some of that stress on your shoulders.

However, your test time is limited and shuffling through the MPEP for an answer will eat up your valuable time. You’ll want to answer as many questions as possible without using the MPEP.

So, what can you do to be prepared? Of course, it is more than simply guessing multiple-choice questions, you need to be prepared as possible. These tips will have you prepared and give you the positive mindset you need.

Have a Plan of Action Ready

Having a plan of action will help keep you organized while you’re studying. You’ll want to create a structured study plan that you can stick to regardless of any distractions.

Do you study better at night or in the morning? Do you have to study around a work schedule? Make sure your study schedule is what works best for you so you can optimize your learning and studying skills.

You should also create a study plan on what you’re going to study and when you’re going to study it. You want to be making sure you’re studying the most important patent cases and the important patent laws.

Set goals for yourself but make sure they’re realistic. Set a goal of how many pages you’re going to read that day or what information you want to have absorbed by the end of a study session. This gives you something specific to focus on.

It helps to ease your mind if on the day of the exam—you know exactly what office building you need to go to and what room you’ll need to report to. This will help maintain the organization you’ve been relying on. If you’re running around and not sure where to go, you’ll stress yourself out.

Take a Study Course

You don’t want to go into the exam blindly. The best way to be prepared for the patent bar examination is to take a study course that caters specifically to the patent bar exam. There are live courses you can take but that’s not your only choice when looking for a patent review course.

We have been offering an independent study review course for over a decade that’s helped prepare countless students to pass the exam. We offer you all the tools and the information that you need to pass the patent bar exam.

Through an independent course like ours, you can study with the aid of your laptop (or even your smart phone) wherever you are. Our interactive course allows you to remember what you’ve learned so you can use the information when you need it.

Study with a Friend or a Group

Adding a study group to your study mix can be extremely beneficial to your learning, especially if you’re a social butterfly. You won’t get lonely during all those hours of studying.

This also gives you a support system to lean on. You’re all taking the patent bar, so all of you will know and understand the pressure the exam will have on you. You can prepare notes, discuss study techniques, and you can even have someone to talk to if you start stressing out over the exam. It’s possible to find someone online to lean on, even if there’s no one near you geographically.

Everyone learns differently and everyone studies differently. All of our brains are unique in the way we remember, think, and perceive information. Studying in a group will open you up to new ways to study and to retain the information you need for the exam.

Study before Bed

Believe it or not, studying before bed can help you retain new information better than studying any other time of the day. It used to be a myth we all relied on the night before a big test in high school. Now there’s science and numerous studies to back it up.

During sleep, our brains create new neurological pathways to help retain the information we absorbed before bed. The cortex of our brain remains active while we’re catching some sleep.

Speaking of sleep, you need a healthy night of sleep before the exam. If you stay up all night studying, chances are you’ll be drained right when you walk into the exam room. You’ll be forgetful, you’ll be sleepy, and your concentration (and your confidence) will drop. And you need to be at your top performance level to handle the 6 hour exam where difficult questions will be thrown your way throughout the entire day. So don’t skip out on sleep the night before.

Bonus Tips

• Practice tests are a fantastic asset when studying for an exam. They let you know where you’re at with your studying and what you need to focus on.
• Do you love music? Music (without lyrics) has been known to help study nights run smoother and help you remember all the information you’re feeding your brain.
• A healthy breakfast before the exam will boost your energy levels, reduce any test anxiety, and boost your confidence.

Conclusion

Studying to become a patent attorney or patent agent doesn’t have to mentally exhaust you. There are instrumental tips you can use to optimize how you retain information, what you retain, and how to use that information to not only pass your exam but to continue to use the information you learned throughout your patent law career.

Engineers and law are a powerful combination. Communication skills learned in law school complement the quantitative skills developed in engineering training. Analyzing legal cases is similar to techniques used in scientific problem-solving.

Patent law is a specialized legal field which involves the trademarking of new products and inventions. Because of this, lawyers and graduates of certain scientific and engineering fields are the only ones who can sit for the patent bar exam. Engineers falls into this specialized group. Engineers should consider learning about patents because it offers an alternative to the regular work an engineer would take on and because it offers the potential of a high salary.

An engineer can succeed in the legal field if some common pitfalls are avoided. The traps tend to make it hard for engineers to adjust to studying law. Once aligned, engineers do as well in law school as their political science classmates.

The Hard Part

There are aspects of law school that are particularly foreign to many engineers and techies.

Reading, Writing & Testing: The sheer volume of required reading is daunting. It is not unusual to be assigned more than 100 pages to read per night. Reading law material is different from reading a novel. Extremely dense cases slow down even the fastest of readers. Case briefings are also a daily assignment and fast students need several hours to keep the pace. The time crunch is at its worst in the first few weeks when students have no idea what they are doing.

It’s also rare for a student in a science based field to have well developed writing skills. Although science and engineering students may be used to preparing lab reports, law students must be able to prepare well-thought out, well-written dissertations and essays.

Likewise, exams will often test in a real-life, analytical scenario. While scientists and engineers are used to clear cut, fact based exams, exams in law school will require employing critical thinking instead of necessarily simply giving the “right” answer.

Engineering Strengths

Luckily, there are many aspects of legal education that people with a techie background have a distinct advantage with.

Analytic Skills & Math: Legal analysis follows a logical progression. It is similar to proofs. Techies know how to think analytically. Non-techies often struggle with this aspect of law school. The engineer has to learn to convey logic in words to produce effective legal writing. The engineer will also have a leg up on other students when it comes to crunching numbers. Patent Law requires lots of in-depth analytics of statistics. Not only will engineers be able to properly analyze and makes sense of the statistics, but legal battles are often won with logic.

Try not to get too concerned about the trials of a legal education. All law schools require first-year students to take a legal writing class, which will help you to develop the writing skills you need to get through. It is essential for engineers to take the class and develop needed skills for final exams. To ensure that you are successful in taking the patent bar exam, you can also participate in prep classes and study groups as well as take part in test exams to ensure your success. Read cases and begin learning how to analyze them.

The Reason for this Presentation

Becoming a patent agent or patent attorney is not the only career option in the area of patent law. However, only students with science and engineering backgrounds can sit for the patent bar exam. Along with the rise in technology over the last 15 years, the demand for intellectual property attorneys has also risen, as well as job prospects for qualified students.

Patent attorneys and agents help clients with the patent navigation to acquire patents for their inventions. A patent agent does not have to have a law degree. The list below gives the median salaries of different types of engineers, patent agents, and patent attorneys.

• Agricultural Engineer $59,220
• Environmental Engineer $63,111
• Biomedical Engineer $63,861
• Industrial Engineer $64,515
• Civil Engineer $65,440
• Structural Engineer $65,606
• Design Engineer $65,714
• Manufacturing Engineer $66,207
• Mechanical Engineer $69,231
• Project Engineer $$69,445
• Chemical Engineer $72,806
• Electrical Engineer $73,699
• Electronics Engineer $75,307
• Software Engineer $81,057
• Aerospace Engineer $82,398
• Nuclear Engineer $84,971
• Patent Agent $92,000
• Petroleum Engineer $101,817
• Patent Attorney $133,000

The experience an engineer accumulates by earning an undergraduate degree in engineering makes patent law an ideal field to move into. The only new credential needed to become a patent agent is passing the patent bar exam. However, as you can see, obtaining a law degree and passing the patent bar exam leads to a more lucrative patent attorney career.

Engineers work with their hands and on computers. Attending meetings and communicating with team members or management may also be duties performed. Patent agents don’t work much with their hands.

Most of the day is spent drafting patent applications or overcoming rejections. They spend time communicating with other office members. Communicating with inventors whose patents they are trying to acquire is also necessary.

The inventors may be individuals, groups, or an engineering company or university like the one where you are currently working. Patent agents likely protect more inventions than they would as an engineer or inventor.

Patent Bar Exam

The exam is a multiple-choice, six-hour exam that contains 100 questions. Details from the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure are tested. When the USPTO introduces new guidelines, supplemental material may need to be reviewed.

The exam is “open-book.” The candidate has access to the MPEP that outlines all patent law aspects. It contains thousands of pages that do not include the supplemental material. The search function is limited.

To benefit from taking the open-book exam, the candidate needs to know topic locations. The test is timed and does not allow for every question to be researched. It takes many people a full year to prepare for the exam. The average time spent studying is three to six months.

Passing the exam is worth the trouble. There are various scenarios for patent agents seeking employment. Many former engineers immediately obtain a job after passing the exam. Some acquire entry-level positions before preparing for the test. There are those who work first for a technology transfer office. Others gain immediate patent agent employment. In addition, the status of an engineer is elevated upon receiving the credential of a registered patent agent so taking and passing the exam is really an opportunity for nearly any engineer.

Preparing for the patent bar exam is more than a little overwhelming. There are a lot of complex details to learn. But if you’re open to taking responsibility for the results and hold yourself accountable, you’re already on your way to being successful. With the patent bar exam and in life, one thing that predicts success is how much accountability you take for your own actions.

A Little About the Exam

Before we talk about proper preparation and the role of personal accountability, let’s take a closer look at the exam itself. If you want to practice as a patent agent or attorney, you have to pass the bar exam. Before you can prepare for an exam, you have to know a little bit about it.

The patent bar exam is structured like many exams with 100 multiple choice questions. The total time to take the exam is 6 hours, but it’s broken down into two sessions. There’s a 3-hour morning session, a 3-hour afternoon session, and an hour break in between. If you do the math, that leaves you with about 3 minutes and 45 seconds per question. That might seem like a lot of time, but most of the questions are long and include a lot of detail.

You must answer at least 70% of the questions correctly to pass. There’s no penalty for getting an answer wrong, so it’s best to make an educated guess, even if you’re not sure.

This test is notoriously difficult. In fact, on average, only 50% of people pass. The pass rate has actually been slightly below that in recent years.

What can you do to give you the best chance of passing? There is no shortcut or trick. You just have to prepare.

How to Prepare

Now for some better news. During your exam, you’re allowed access to the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP). It just so happens that the patent bar exam tests your knowledge of the MPEP and how well you apply it. That said, some people mistakenly think that since the patent exam is an open test they don’t bother to prepare properly.

While it’s technically true that the exam is open book, it’s unrealistic to think that you’re going to be able to look up all the questions on test day. However, figuring out how to use the MPEP efficiently is a good start toward preparing for the exam.

On exam day, the best way to approach the questions is to assume that you’ll need to spend time looking up the concepts that you don’t know.

One really important thing about preparing is that you actually have to do it. That’s where personal accountability comes in.

Personal Accountability and Passing (or Failing) the Patent Bar Exam

Generally, personal accountability can be explained with one simple question. How much of your success in life do you think is in your control?

Believe it or not, if you think that your actions, behaviors, and choices are responsible for your own success, you’re more likely to be successful. If you believe that you are at least 85% responsible for your own success and that only 15% is left to chance or luck, you have a good chance of being successful in whatever you’re trying to achieve.

Therefore, if you believe that your preparation, knowledge, and skill are going to contribute to passing the bar exam, then you’re more likely to pass. It’s not hard to see why. People who have personal accountability know that the time they put into preparing for the patent bar exam is more important than just hoping for a good score or a run of good luck. These are the people who are more likely to do the work needed to succeed.

Not everyone has this much personal accountability, though. The good news? It’s a skill you can learn.

The first step is to take responsibility for your actions. Responsible people know what they need to do, and they do it. That applies to both good and bad situations. It’s easy to take responsibility for hard work or a job that turned out well; but you also have to accept responsibility when the outcomes are not what you expected.

An important way to focus on learning how to take responsibility is to not focus on the past. You can’t change the past. Dwelling on it often leads to regret and what-if’s. Instead, focus on what you can actively do about it. If you’ve failed exams in that past, try not to dwell on it or have the mindset that you’re just a bad test taker. Instead, ask yourself what you can do to have the best chance of passing.

Personal accountability also has an element of self-empowerment. This helps you realize that you really do have the ability to change things and you can start to take the actions necessary to get what you want. It’s one thing to know what you have to do. It’s another thing altogether to actually do it.

By taking responsibility for your own success and seeing that you have the power to change, you’ll be able to make things happen.

The patent bar exam is not easy, but it’s not impossible. Preparing is your best shot at passing.  Whether or not you do the proper prep work is completely in your hands.

Think positive!

How many times have you heard that phrase in your life? In preparing for your career as a patent agent or attorney, you’re likely going to hear this a lot. The patent bar exam is intimidating and finding a job can be a long, frustrating process.

As it turns out, there is merit in the idea of positive thinking. It might surprise you to learn that there is actually some scientific evidence that backs it up.

It Starts with Self-Talk

You might think that positive thinking means trying to turn every situation into a positive one, but that’s not exactly the case. You can’t ignore that there are unpleasant, sad, and even downright devastating things that happen in life. Positive thinking just means that you approach them differently. You always try to see the best possible outcome instead of the worst.

Self-talk is the stream of thoughts that go through everyone’s head, all the time. It’s also the source of positive thinking. One of the easiest ways to become a positive thinker is to identify negative thoughts when they show up. For some examples, let’s look at some common forms of negative thinking.

• Filtering out positive things while magnifying the negative
• Blaming yourself when things go wrong, even when they have nothing to do with you
• Automatically expecting the worst possible outcome
• Only seeing things as all good or all bad, all black or all white with no shades of gray

If during your preparations for the patent bar you become overwhelmed and immediately start doubting yourself, the rest of your studying probably isn’t going to be very productive. If you look at the passing rates and think, “I don’t have a chance!” then you’re definitely not walking into test day with the best attitude.

The same is true when you’re looking for a job, especially once you land an interview. You have to be able to walk into that first meeting with your future boss and believe that you can get the job. It will affect every interaction you have during the interview and give the impression that you are the best person for the job.

How to Think Positive

If you aren’t a naturally positive thinker, you can become one with a little time and effort. Treat it like any other habit. The more often you do it, the more a part of your life it becomes.

Here are some ways to practice being more optimistic:

• Focus on the things you usually think negatively about and make a focused effort to be more positive. Start small and focus on one thing at a time.
• Learn how to recognize when the negative thoughts get through. What triggered it? Is there a pattern? Once you can pick up on this, it’s easier to catch yourself and stop it.
• Try to laugh as much as you can. It helps reduce stress which will automatically make you feel more positive.
• Surround yourself with people who have a good outlook on life. You’ll get better advice and encouragement from people who always see the positive side of things.
• Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to your best friend. It’s true that we are often meaner to ourselves than we would ever be to anyone else. Start treating yourself with the same respect you give other people.
• Meditate to help you clear the stress and negativity from your mind.
• Keep a journal or diary to get out any negative thoughts. Sometimes, writing down what’s bothering you is enough to get it out of your head.
• Take a break every once in a while. Give yourself time to participate in activities you really like and that make you feel good.

Focusing on a Successful Career

The first step to being a successful patent agent or attorney is to pass the patent bar exam. As we’ve mentioned, the exam is difficult, and you might be tempted to let yourself think that it’s impossible. By learning how to think positively, you can stop those negative and intrusive thoughts.

Instead, practice positive self-talk. Tell yourself that you can do it. Congratulate yourself when you learn a section of the material. Think about other big exams that you’ve taken in your life that you did well on. Keeping a positive attitude while you prepare will help you keep motivated to put in the necessary work. The more prepared you are, the more likely you are to pass.

Keep these strategies in mind when you are job hunting, too. Instead of thinking, “why would they want me?” think, “I am awesome, why wouldn’t they want me?”  By seeing your worth and believing that good things can happen, you will approach the job hunt in a more positive way which will show through everything you do.

If you walk into an interview and don’t believe you belong there, that’s going to come through. If you walk in expecting the best possible result, that’s going to show, too. Making a good impression is important when you’re interviewing and being positive is one way to do that.

Don’t forget about self-care. Taking time to decompress before something as stressful as an interview or a big exam can do wonders for your attitude. Sometimes, all you need to get rid of negative thoughts is a clear head.

Make It Real

The true power of positive thinking isn’t magic. You can’t walk into the patent exam without preparing or show up to a job interview without the required experience and assume things are going to work out the way you want them to. But being able to picture the reality you want and believing that it’s possible will give you the motivation you need to do everything you have to do to keep preparing.

What you focus on does become your reality. If you constantly think you’re going to fail, it’s likely that you will. That said, if you allow yourself to think positively, be hopeful, and do the necessary work to prepare, then you’ll find that you might end up exactly where you wanted to be.

The Patent Training Workshop has now replaced the older, Basic Patent Training course within the PES Patent Bar review. We have produced and uploaded approximately 12 hours of video for the new course and it is ready to go for you.

Now when you login to the course, you’ll see the Patent Training Workshop right up top.

Clicking on that will take you to the Patent Training Workshop home page.

If you still want to access the Basic Patent Training course, there is a link to do so at the bottom of the Patent Training Workshop home page.

The Patent Training Workshop is set out with an Introductory Module which covers the who, what, why, when, where, and how to’s of patent law. It is around 1 hour in length and will provide you with the basics of patent law. If you haven’t yet enrolled and are interested, you may watch the videos in the Introductory Module for free by signing up to get a Trial Account.

Once you’ve watched the Introductory Module, you will progress onto Module I of the Patent Training Workshop.

Here is a breakdown of Modules I – IX:

At this point, it is a very complete course that will walk you through the details of most all the topics covered on the Patent Bar exam (in fact, we have 80+ videos in the course right now). There area number of different videos each covering a different topic, quiz questions after each module, as well as a full glossary. Here’s an example of an expanded module:

The Patent Training Workshop is just the first step in the PES Patent Bar review. Once you go through it, you will have gained expertise in the area of patent law and will be more than ready to progress onto Step II which is mastering the MPEP.  That’s where you’ll learn the details and structure of the MPEP through our Guidebooks to Patent Law as well as the Workbook Quizzes.

To really integrate the Workshop into the rest of our program, we link to the related videos from the Patent Training Workshop on each Guidebook chapter page.

As you can see, there’s a new icon titled ‘Training’ and clicking on that will take you to the video(s) that cover topics in the chapter from the Patent Training Workshop course.

For instance, in the home page for chapter 100, we have embedded the ‘Access’ and ‘Foreign Filing License’ Patent Training videos for easy access.

Both these topics are covered in chapter 100 so you can watch those videos either for the first time, or for a second time right before you go through the chapter. Each topic video in the Workshop averages around 10 minutes in length. So they don’t take up too much of your time and re-watching them is only going to help you master the material.

We’ve done this for each chapter and section covered in the Guidebooks.

Here’s another example, this one from chapter 600, which covers ‘Parts, Form and Content of Application’.

As you can see, this chapter includes a number of videos pulled out for you and embedded right where you need them.

We do suggest going through the complete Patent Training Workshop first and then starting in with Step II of the program. If you’d like to re-watch the videos in that second step, this new feature will make it easy for you to find what you need.

And if  you’re already part of the way through the course, you can definitely watch the videos as you get to them while working through the Guidebook or set some time aside to go through the entire Workshop full of videos.

Think of it as an additional tool to help you pass and if you’re already enrolled, you gain access to it at no extra charge.

We’re very happy to put this new training together for you and help you get on the path to a new career in patent law!