Covid-19 and the Intellectual Property Sector Round Up 2 and 3.
I’ve posted round ups two and three on LinkedIn recently so have amalgamated them both here.
Round Up 2.
Day two and I’ve found a variety of news and articles for you to peruse.
Kathryn Szymczyk of Gowling had put together a very useful summary of what’s happening with some of the major IP regulatory bodies around the world.
Business Insider reports on the patent portfolio of defunct and controversial company Theranos. The portfolio is now owned by an investment group and that group is using its recently acquired IP to sue a health startup who are trying to develop a Covid-19 test.
Meanwhile, Israel has approved the licensing of HIV drug Kaletra to treat Covid-19. This constitutes the first time since a 1967 patent law came into force that Israel is using an article in that law that permits approval of a generic version of a patent-protected drug. Ynet has more details.
And finally for this edition, Bloomberg reports that “Patent Litigation Sees ‘Exponential’ Changes Amid Coronavirus”. Changes such as remote trials, trials and hearings cancelled entirely and dealing with restrictions on travel.
More next week, if there’s anything you want me to cover from the personal to the epic, just let me know.
Round Up 3.
It has taken me a great deal longer to get to this round up today. Homeschooling is difficult!!! And to be fair my wife is doing much more of it than me but I definitely miss the kids being in school. We went and got a load of PCs from the office today so both our kids have a computer each but how on earth are people supposed to home school and work in families where the number of devices is more limited? We’re pretty lucky in that regard, no one is using the PCs at work obviously so we had a few lying around. Our home has computers in every corner now though. There are so many. It hard to walk anywhere between the computers and our massive stockpile of toilet paper (that’s a joke! We don’t have that much at all, or do we?).
It’s hard to get a steer currently on how the intellectual property sector feels about business opportunities in general. Most firms we work with around the world have managed to traverse the perils of setting up home working and I think for some jurisdictions that will be a significant cultural change. In the UK there were certainly some patent firms that have been spectacularly awful at home and flexible working who have been given a huge wake up call on the benefits and organisational challenges.
From a recruitment perspective we’ve seen a variety of reactions. Some of our clients seem to be full steam ahead, switch to video interviewing but we’re still very much hiring (thank goodness for them!). They tend to be the businesses that had some element of a remote workforce anyway so are less overwhelmed by the circumstances. Some clients have put all recruitment on hold for the foreseeable which is naturally, deeply concerning for us but we of course understand the instinct. The rest are somewhere in between. IP business largely continues and so you need people to do it but firms may be in less of a rush to find people.
From an attorney perspective there is a great deal more worry. Some were planning to sit the EQEs or pre-EQE and haven’t been able to, so their plans have had to change and opportunities appear more limited. Or, people are staying put when they would have otherwise moved. If I have any (slightly self interested) suggestions in this regard it’s that for firms – finding electronics attorneys is very difficult in general, so if you can hire new people, recruiting now may be best timing to fill the vacancies that have been outstanding for months. For candidates, I would say that yes the market has slowed and so you might need a recruiter more than ever to help you navigate. Speculative applications are far less likely to be successful than they are in normal circumstances.
I’ve not heard of any redundancies in the IP sector so far which probably makes sense, the impact of the financial crisis on IP was a little delayed and the same may the case here (or hopefully not). Although it’s also worth saying that I think many of the firms that made redundancies in 2008/9 regretted it in many cases and overreacted. I launched Fellows and Associates in late 2009 and even by that point the overwhelming majority of candidates that had lost their jobs had found new ones and there were already shortages of qualified attorneys. The major impact on the profession was the graduate intake and we have been suffering from the low numbers entering the sector following the crash ever since, with massive demographic gaps at certain levels. Hopefully this time around, graduate intake will not suffer to any great degree.
Thanks for reading, sorry this edition has been more an outpouring of words than news, I’ll try and do better tomorrow. As always if you spot anything that would be worth me including please let me know!