Anyone with a degree in engineering or the hard sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, related fields) can take the U.S. Patent Office’s Registration Exam. If a student passes the Exam, they can call themselves a patent agent, and represent clients in front of the Patent Office to help them get patents, among other things. Once a patent agent passes a state bar (any state bar), they can call themselves a registered patent attorney.
Patent law is a relatively thriving, cutting-edge area of the law.
Although the Registration Exam is also called the “Patent Bar Exam,” students don’t need to go to law school, or indeed have any legal training, to take the Exam. The Patent Office cares only about their engineering or science degree.
The new trend is for people to take the Exam before they start law school. Passing the Exam before law school can put your students on a career trajectory that will be the envy of their peers. They should have a shot at a true patent law job in the summer between their first and second years of law school (while peers may struggle, and accept unpaid externships for the experience, and the like).
We recommend studying 150-200 hours total, ideally over a month or two. So the summer before starting law school may be the ideal time to get this done.
PLI offers the first prep course to prepare people to take the Registration Exam, and it’s still by far the most highly regarded. We assume our students have no prior knowledge of patent law, or even patents. About a third of our takers are engineers and scientists, most with no legal training or patent experience whatsoever, and they pass at every bit as high a rate as our takers who are law students and lawyers. Our pass rate is almost double the official pass rate for the Exam, and we prepare more than a thousand people a year to pass the Exam.
For more information about patent careers for engineers and scientists, check out our YouTube videos at https://bit.ly/3xgT6uF— and please feel free to share with your students.
Our testimonials page speaks to the fact that we regularly take people from no knowledge of patents to passing the Exam.
Students get a $1,000 discount off the regular course price. (If a student signs up online using a .edu email address, that discount is applied automatically.)
Students can sign up for our newsletter (below) about the Patent Office Exam and our course.