What happened to all of the IP jobs in 2024 and why are some of them back now?
2024 has been a really weird year. Fellows and Associates started the financial year on the back of our two most successful years ever. 2022/23 was a surprise given we were still coming out of Covid, albeit following a reasonably strong recovery in 2021. Then 2023/24 built on the previous year. Having had two back-to-back years with high profitability despite the broader economic climate we assumed that this financial year would be much of the same, perhaps a little drop off, perhaps a little increase but in the same general area. That’s proved not to be the case at all.
We possibly should have identified this earlier, we run on a UK tax year (so our financial year ends at the end of March) and there were some signs that the number of jobs was slowing in the UK market back then but basking in the success of the year to date we didn’t realise that this was a trend and not a blip.
What happened and why are we more optimistic about the latter half of the financial year?
My working theory is that the years following the height of the pandemic was the IP market playing catch up. In February 2020 we were really busy, people on interview, new instructions, firms talking about plans for later in the year, then when the first lockdown hit pretty much every single thing we were working on dropped off a cliff. I remember vividly having a conversation with a client at the beginning of the pandemic who said in words that now seem even more wise than they did then, ‘if your business survives this you will come out of it stronger and with a real competitive advantage’. He was right and if I’d realised just how right he was I maybe wouldn’t have gone through my Mad Max phase in lockdown for quite so long (where I was playing video games and watching movies that were all post-apocalyptic). I do look great in leather chaps though. The nihilism and the wallowing didn’t take up all of my time and in those early days of lockdown I was able to keep Fellows and Associates in people’s minds to some degree with regular articles and other content as well as chatting to candidates and former candidates and comparing chaps (ok maybe not the last part).
It was this focus on staying in touch that meant that my wise client was right and we were in a very strong and ready position when the market started to pick up towards the end of 2020. We launched back into business ahead of many of our competitors shooting into space at breakneck speed, seemingly never reaching orbit. Much of the reason for this, in my opinion, is that the recruitment that stopped abruptly in early 2020 was still required. The IP sector in terms of its own workload barely slowed down during the pandemic and these unrealised recruitment needs became ever more pressing. And when firms start recruiting, people leave jobs that in turn create new vacancies. This continued for over two years.
This year, it looks like a great deal of the outstanding recruitment has been caught up. Add to this some of the geopolitical factors impacting the broader UK economy may have finally impacted the IP sector and there were some redundancies and firms losing clients. Much of the recruitment has been gap filling due to someone leaving or relatively early-career recruitment to cover peaks in workload without too large a financial commitment. It has, largely been less hopeful, less aspirational. When the IP market is soaring, we have optimistic recruitment – finding Partners and potential Partners with or without a client following to expand the firm; Senior Associate hires to help build a practice and progress; potential new offices or new business streams. The lack of this kind of optimism has been what has caused a major part of the slowdown.
IP recruitment can be recruitment jazz. It’s what makes the sector the most rewarding of all recruitment sectors I’ve worked in. It’s about finding solutions that clients didn’t know they needed, or completely surprising answers to the questions they ask. But when the market gets tighter it restricts the fluidity, no longer are you creating new melodies, you are simply whistling the tune you’ve been told to whistle. And this can be very difficult, in a market where there are far fewer jobs there can be fewer candidates too as people are reluctant to move. This is what happens in IP because we rarely, if ever, have more than a handful of redundancies even in the most difficult of climates, so less jobs on the market does not mean a great choice of candidates. It usually means less candidates too.
For much of 2024 we have faced very tightly specific recruitment, quite often without urgency and at the risk of being cancelled at any moment coupled with far fewer candidates looking to move than compared to a normal year, particularly at the experience level the firms are most looking for (nearly/newly qualified attorneys). So why the newfound optimism? There are some signs that I need to reach for the saxophone again (metaphorically, you definitely don’t want to literally hear me play sax) and start creating. More instructions, noticeably more since late September, more openness to creative ideas, active instructions for Partners and an uptick in people considering moving roles. At first, I thought maybe this was a blip too, a momentary spell of activity but it does seem to be bedding in. More firms are recruiting, we’re receiving new instructions frequently and whilst the majority of vacancies remain at the nearly/newly qualified level, particularly in electronics, computer science, physics and engineering there are signs that biotechnology, trademarks and to a lesser extent chemistry are all beginning to pick up again.
We’re lucky at Fellows and Associates that our business does not rely entirely on the UK IP market. Our international clients were quicker to start recruiting again during the pandemic and we’re growing our international focus helping create recruitment jazz all over the world. But the UK is our foundation and I’m ready to build on that again.
If you’ve been waiting to look for a job it might be time to take advantage of a climate that is really beginning to look positive before everyone gets the same idea and you have a lot more competition. That goes for clients and potential clients too, it’s not quite peak recruitment yet. You are less likely to be in a four-way bidding war for candidates with a bunch of other firms but who knows, if this is like late 2020, perhaps we’re at the start of that becoming a reality again sometime soon. In the meantime, you’ll be glad to know that my chaps are on ice or whatever the appropriate storage method is for chaps.
I hope to hear from you, happy to chat about your favourite piece of post-apocalyptic fiction or talk about IP recruitment. Or maybe a bit of both.
Pete Fellows is the Managing Director of Fellows and Associates. He wouldn’t last five minutes in the Thunderdome.