Fellows as a Jack of all Trades (as long as it is in IP)
A little while ago Phillipa Field, consultant at Fellows and Associates, was tasked with introducing the Fellows brand to other areas of Intellectual Property recruitment as a possible expansion of the core areas of their business. Turns out it was a pretty good idea.
I’d like to think that Fellows and Associates has always been one of the ‘go to’ businesses for patent and trade mark attorney recruitment in the
UK (and internationally), ranging from part qualified up to Partner level hires. This remit has since evolved over the years and we have more recently expanded our expertise to offer our assistance on niche recruitment assignments encompassing most (if not all) roles available within the Intellectual Property sphere.
A key part of our business plan has always been to build our brand through attending international networking events and, as a result, develop our knowledge of the sector through speaking to various professionals working within it. We noticed that a notable proportion of the connections that we were making were working for IP service providers and that, other than a LinkedIn request and a friendlier greeting the following year, our contact didn’t really progress much further than that. This triggered the thought process that perhaps a business opportunity was to be had and, after reaching out to our network of contacts in this area (which had been conveniently formed over years of attendance at INTA, AIPPI and the like), we realised that we could potentially offer a hand in helping such businesses grow further.
Companies offering third party services to the IP industry are very much on the rise, with many firms preferring to outsource their administrative and support needs to dedicated providers rather than managing it in-house. As far as we’re aware, there are no specialist recruiters who have a consolidated knowledge base spanning across the legal and IP sectors, as well as those affiliated with professionals working for a service provider – such as sales, operations and project management. It seems that normal practice thus far has been to instruct a general recruitment firm and trust that they grasp the finer details of the Intellectual Property sector, or in rarer circumstances ask a more specialised IP or legal recruiter to source candidates that they would not normally have on their database (which could attract an initial retainer fee). Our attendance at industry events over the years (and not forgetting the fact that we’re very lovely and friendly people) has resulted in us unknowingly creating a database of such contacts and we hoped this, coupled with our established knowledge and reputation in patent and trade mark recruitment, could help us carve out this niche area of our business.
This mix of unwitting networking and our continued presence in the IP recruitment sector seems to have well and truly worked in our favour, with assignments for less conventional industry roles slowly but surely increasing over the past few years. Initially, the brief would more often than not call for sales professionals needed to handle the business development of the company in question, however this has now expanded to include much more complex hires such as experienced paralegals with a very specific skill set or translation managers specialising in a number of languages (and ideally some experience of IP). This change in direction could possibly be the result of our newest recruitment arm growing in tandem with the clients we work most regularly with, and after helping them source those tasked with the responsibility of selling the business and its services to the market, they are now in a position to further expand the product line and develop a more multifaceted work force.
It has to be said that a significant proportion of our active assignments for IP service providers are based outside of the UK, with both Europe and the US recruiting heavily for sales roles, paralegals and managerial positions. We have always sporadically worked on overseas assignments recruiting more general IP roles, such as your run of the mill patent or trade mark attorney; however there does seem to be more of an openness for third parties in the industry to work across borders and recruit from other jurisdictions. Judging from the rate at which some of our clients within this field are growing, perhaps this is something firms of patent and trade mark attorneys or law firms with an IP function can learn from in the future.
So what does this mean for you Mr/Mrs Service Provider or Patent Attorney firm reading this? Well for service providers, we understand this market better than any other recruitment firm (in our opinion), we have a more extensive contact base and we have shown versatility in respect to the roles we’re able to work on. For law firms and patent and trade mark firms, it means that outside of attorney recruitment we have a contact base of people experienced within the IP sector who could be suitable for support positons; from business development directors and senior paralegals, to marketing, IT, and translation professionals.
Phillipa is open to recruiting any type of role for her clients, as long as there’s cookies, an international trip and a kitten involved.