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 you pass the Exam before graduating from law school, you can call yourself a Patent Agent, and represent clients in front of the Patent Office to help them get patents, among other things. Once you’ve passed a state bar (any state bar), you can call yourself 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,” you don’t need to go to law school, or indeed have any legal training, to take the Exam. The Patent Office cares only about your 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 you on a career trajectory that will be the envy of your peers. You should have a shot at a true patent law job in the summer between your first and second years of law school (while your 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 you start 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 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.

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 you sign up online using a .edu email address, that discount is applied automatically.)

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