State of the Intellectual Property Recruitment Market, January 2021
The UK continues to jump out of the frying pan into the fire, only to leave the fire and find an even bigger frying pan where the only route of escape is via a fire. Fortunately, the Intellectual Property profession must have invested in some fire-retardant clothing, at least a fire-retardant t-shirt if not the entire ensemble.
Between Brexit and the pandemic what can we expect from 2021 and where are we now? In respect to private practice most firms I speak to tell me they have not seen anywhere near the dramatic drop off in work since March 2020 that one might have anticipated. In fact, some firms are seeing pre-pandemic levels of revenue. It’s too early to tell in all likelihood what impact Brexit will have, particularly on the trade mark profession but there is at least as much optimism as pessimism.
At the beginning of 2020, firms were, to generalise, under-staffed for the circumstances of the time. There were many more vacancies than there were candidates to fill them. This has meant, I believe, that if and where work has dropped off, for the most part firms have not needed to make redundancies or even furlough fee-earners. There are some exceptions but as a trend job security has not been dissimilar to where it was in 2019. More surprisingly, this also seems to be the case in house. Whilst there have been cut backs and redundancies for IP attorneys in corporate roles this has been far less than appeared might be the case back in the early months of the pandemic. Is everything awesome? Nope, unfortunately it’s too early for Lego anthems but everything is okay-ish. Given the larger global and economic picture, okay-ish might just be a little bit awesome.
The IP profession is risk averse. And much like the financial crisis of 2008 one of the early steps most firms took was to freeze all recruitment. There has been very little recruitment for most of 2020. However, given the relatively stability of employment, it has been more difficult to find candidates when firms are recruiting as attorneys are reluctant to risk moving firms. For a time, there were few jobs and few candidates. Much of the recruitment that has happened has been of the less urgent, ‘nice to have’ type so firms have also been very strict on the criteria they use to determine a potential recruit. To speculate, Partners have perhaps wanted to grow their departments but have been under pressure to justify any new hire to their colleagues which has meant that the burden of proof is much higher for candidates. The lack of jobs is perhaps one of the reasons why at times during the last year Fellows and Associates were the only IP recruiter to be advertising at all on the CIPA website and even now at the time of writing are only one of two. We’ve been fortunate that some of our close clients have been recruiting in some capacity but we have had to rely on goodwill and a strong network more than ever before (including the nervous days of our launch in 2009).
The last two to three months have been interesting. December was the busiest month of the year for us in terms of new instructions but it was also the busiest December in IP recruitment I can remember. I’m not entirely sure why but I would theorise that perhaps if firms were under-staffed back in February 2020 and work has not dropped off for the most part, then not hiring becomes unsustainable. I think there’s also been a change in collective mindset in so much that the pandemic is not something to move past then return to normal but might be something we need to live with. Stalling recruitment forevermore may be uselessly waiting for an outcome that will never happen. December is usually a quiet month for recruitment and one unusually busy period is not an indication of anything as yet. I will have more of an idea where we truly stand by the end of February, the six weeks from mid-January to the end of February often being our busiest.
The financial crisis of 2008 caused a similar stalling of recruitment (albeit to nowhere near the extent of 2020), as did, to a much lesser extent, the Brexit referendum result of 2016. My fear is that the lessons of those events may not have been learned. Following both, there seemed to be an unconscious collective decision for firms to start recruiting again all at the same time. We went from recruitment bust to boom in a matter of months but this was far from ideal. The available candidates remained very much a finite resource and demand massively outstripped supply. This resulted in a bidding war for excellent candidates or even not so excellent candidates and with many firms looking for the same thing at the same time it was not an environment that was particularly easy to navigate. I would recommend that firms try and get ahead of this, if they can, at this stage I can’t see any reason why events of the past won’t repeat. It may be in the latter half or 2021 or even 2022 but at some point, under-resourcing will be a huge issue that for some firms is almost impossible to resolve. Flexibility will help, even though nearly everyone is working from home at the moment, many firms still seem reluctant to commit to hiring someone who works remotely most of the time (for example because they live in another part of the country). Whilst being fully remote will not always be possible (for reasons such as receiving or delivering training, staff supervision, business development) it may be more achievable than some firms will currently allow despite the considerable body of evidence from 2020. With potential future employees used to working from home firms who more proactively support this if and when the pandemic has ended are highly likely to be at a competitive advantage when recruiting.
As for Brexit, I think it really depends who you talk to. I would say that of the people I have spoken to, 60-70% are cautiously optimistic that either the negative impact will be minimal or that there will be a positive impact. I would think that most within the IP profession would have preferred a different result in 2016 but the increased bureaucracy of not being a member of the EU particularly in relation to trade marks could produce a significant uplift in work. At Fellows and Associates we have been consolidating our position in this area by increasing our network of European Trade Mark Attorneys across the main EU states in part in anticipation that more British firms will likely wish to grow their presence within the EU. If that is part of your strategy, we are now very well placed to help.
Conclusions
At present there is not a heap of recruitment but it is busier now than at any point since the beginning of March 2020. Firms remain hesitant to recruit but then candidates are hesitant to leave a job. The IP profession has been resilient in respect to revenue which means there is a likely a latent demand. When firms start recruiting en masse again that there could be a snowball effect of massive demand and massive undersupply. For firms, it would make sense to move early ahead of this possible upwards curve. For candidates, if you can, it might be worth hanging on a little bit longer where you are, or, at the very least, that there will be more options as the year progresses. At least I hope so.