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Patent Lawyers

Experience, Skills, and Personality Traits

Patent lawyers gain experience while in law school and with summer jobs or internships working in law offices or corporations. Patent application drafting, advanced legal writing, and comprehensive reading and research skills are all required to be a competitive applicant.

Patent lawyers must have experience and skills outside the legal professional, such as in engineering or bioscience. Depending on the area of patent law, you will need to have either work experience or a bachelor's degree (or higher) in a technical field.

While scientific aptitude and knowledge are clearly important for achieving success in this field, verbal skills tend to be at just as important as the more analytic, scientific ones. While just communicating with the inventor may take all your skill and scientific background, the even greater challenge often comes when you have to communicate that specialized and technical knowledge to a judge who may have no scientific or technical training.