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Is Corporatision Creating a ‘Brain Drain’ in the Australasian Patent Attorney Profession, or is it Just Slick Marketing?
An article appeared on the Lexology legal news service in the past week that riled me a little – not least because it mentions my name and (in my view) misrepresents something that I wrote a few months ago. For those who may be unfamiliar with Lexology, it is a service that aggregates content from legal and attorney firms, and other service providers, creating a searchable archive and delivering tailored email bulletins to subscribers. It is free to subscribe and read, but the firms that provide all the content pay handsomely for the privilege of being aggregated and distributed. In other words, it is not so much a ‘news’ service for readers as it is a marketing service for the contributing firms. Most of the content is originally published on the firms’ web sites, from which it is automatically picked up (‘ingested’) by Lexology.
While many of the articles appearing on the Lexology site are useful and informative – e.g. reports of the latest legal developments in various jurisdictions served by the contributing firms – some are pure marketing. The piece that has so irked me falls, in my opinion, into the latter category.
The article in question is entitled ‘The brain drain: why are senior patent attorneys leaving?’ Authorship is attributed to James & Wells partners Ceri Wells and Adam Luxton. Wells is one of the firm’s founders, while Luxton recently joined the firm having previously worked for Spruson & Ferguson – a firm owned by listed holding company IPH Limited (ASX:IPH). Lexology picked the article up from James & Wells’ website, although that was not its first outing – it was originally published as a sponsored article in Australasian Lawyer [PDF 1.04MB].
Never let it be said, then, that James & Wells has not extracted maximum value from the piece, which bears all the hallmarks of having been written not by Wells and Luxton themselves, but rather by a marketing professional. It takes the classic public relations form of ostensibly objective reporting, interspersed with quoted and paraphrased comments from Wells and Luxton in support of the article’s main theses, which are that:
- there has been an ‘exodus of senior patent attorneys from formerly private firms’ because of ‘corporatisation’, and the acquisition and merger strategies of the listed holding companies IPH Limited and QANTM IP Limited (ASX:QIP);
- as a result, those firms are losing the benefit of these senior practitioners’ experience, and they are ‘being replaced by younger people with a lot less experience’ who are ‘missing out on the mentorship they need at that point in their career’;
- this may lead to junior attorneys feeling ‘overworked and stressed’;
- practitioners in ‘corporatised’ firms may lack the autonomy and discretion to keep clients ‘at the forefront’ and to build strong relationships ‘based on trust and respect’; and
- established firms now owned within corporate groups are no longer able to guarantee clients that ‘whoever you engaged in that organisation would be able to deliver’.
Overall, the tenor of the article is simply that ‘corporatised firms = bad’ whereas ‘traditional privately held, partnership type models (like James & Wells) = good’. Perhaps it feels plausible that this might be so, and doubtless there are people around who will attest, anecdotally, to some experience that supports the argument.
I am just not persuaded that it is true, or that having firms going around claiming that it is are doing the Australasian profession any favours.
Read more »‘Patent Box’ Update – the Devil is in the Details When it Comes to Dates
I previously reported on the Australian government’s budget announcement that it will be introducing a so-called ‘patent box’ tax incentive for medical and biotech (and, possibly, clean energy) innovations. Implementation details of the scheme are yet to be worked out, and the government is promising to consult closely with industry on the design of the patent box. However, while the final form of the scheme – which will not come into effect until 1 July 2022 – may not be known for many months, there is already at least one critical issue that prospective users of the system may need to consider.
The government’s fact sheet on ‘tax incentives to support the recovery’ states that ‘…granted patents, which were applied for after the Budget announcement, will be eligible’. There is, as yet, no clear indication of what the government means by ‘applied for’, however in its ‘What’s New’ email (to which you can subscribe here), sent on 14 May 2021, IP Australia states that ‘[t]o be eligible, the patent must have a priority date after 11 May 2021…’. Being unable to find this detail in the budget papers, I sent out a tweet asking whether anybody else had seen it, and tagging @IPAustralia, which responded:
Hi Mark, thanks for your comment. This is our understanding of the announcement. Further details on the patent box will be released in the coming weeks by Treasury as part of the public consultation.
— IP Australia (@IPAustralia) May 14, 2021
There is a big difference between ‘priority date’ and ‘filing date’, which hopefully will be open for discussion during the public consultation. If the critical date is the priority date, then this means that Australian medical and biotech innovators who have already filed a priority application (e.g. a provisional application) prior to the budget announcement would not be eligible for the patent box tax incentive if they subsequently file a complete application claiming the benefit of the provisional filing date. On the other hand, if they were now to file the same complete application in Australia without a priority claim, then they would be eligible for the scheme upon grant of any resulting patent.
The risk of dropping a valid claim to priority, of course, is there there may be intervening prior art that could invalidate or limit the scope of the claims, which has been made public after the priority date, but before the subsequent complete filing date. To minimise this risk, the complete application should be filed as soon as possible.
Fortunately, the Australian grace period protects an applicant against their own disclosures during the 12 months prior to the complete filing date. Furthermore, the discovery of intervening prior art would not be fatal, at least up until grant of the patent (see regulation 10.2B(7) of the Patents Regulations 1991), since the patent request could be amended to include the priority claim, with the consequence that the patent box incentive would then be unavailable.
The choice to file in Australia without claiming priority would not affect the applicant’s right to claim priority in other jurisdiction, either through direct applications or via the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).
But, frankly, this seems perverse. To my mind, the logical choice for the critical date is the filing date of the complete patent application, which commences the patent term of up to 20 years during which the patent box tax incentive could be claimed. Basing eligibility on the priority date will simply encourage strategies, such as I have outlined above, to engineer eligibility. This does not serve anybody’s interests. The government will not make significant savings on the operation of the patent box scheme, while applicants will feel compelled to adapt their patent filing strategies simply to comply with an arbitrary choice of eligibility criteria.
Hopefully, through the consultation process, common sense will prevail. In the meantime, however, medical and biotech innovators with pending priority applications should probably seek advice from their patent attorneys.
IP Australia Rises to the Challenge of Surging Demand for Innovation Patents
Last month, IP Australia issued a notification informing applicants that, due to a high volume of new filings, they may experience delays in having innovation patents granted. Innovation patents are issued following a formalities examination only – substantive examination for novelty, innovative step, and other requirements, occurs after grant, and only upon request. As a result the delay between filing and grant is typically relatively short, and has historically been less than four weeks. However, with a phasing-out of the innovation patent system now looming, and Chinese applicants in particular using the system to claim government subsidies on foreign granted patents, innovation patent applications are currently being filed at over four times their ‘normal’ historical rates. This obviously means a lot of extra work for IP Australia to process all of these additional applications.
The good news is that after letting things get a little out-of-hand over summer (when, presumably, many staff were on annual leave), IP Australia now appears to be bringing the situation back under control. Average pendency (i.e. the delay between filing and grant) peaked at 68 days for innovation patents granted in March, before falling to 52 days in April. In both March and April, the number of patents granted exceeded the number of new applications filed, and the number of pending applications fell from a peak of 1229 in February to 879 at the end of April. While this is still much higher than historical levels of about 100-150 innovation patent applications pending at any given time, it is clear that IP Australia has allocated additional resources, and has ramped-up handling of new innovation patent applications to the point where it is now once again processing them faster than they are being filed.
Up until March, it looked as though delays could continue to grow. It now seems likely that average pendency will be back below a month by July. This is, of course, barring any further surge in demand that outstrips processing capacity – which could certainly happen, given that the final date for filing new innovation patent applications before the phase-out begins is 25 August 2021, and a last-minute rush might be expected. But, for now at least, it looks like IP Australia has the situation in hand.
Read more »Microsoft closes deal to produce AR headsets for US Army
The company’s 2019 HoloLens 2 headset is a head-mounted display, designed for enterprise applications using technology previously developed for consumer-focused hardware.
The HoloLens 2 displays hologram-like images overlaid on the wearer’s real-world field of vision, aiming to provide useful information (such as instructions or communications) and improve efficiency for workers whose hands are occupied with physical tasks. The HoloLens can be controlled with gestures or voice commands.
The military contract will see Microsoft move into the production phase of technology based on the HoloLens 2 and backed by its Azure cloud computing services. The Pentagon described the technology as an “Integrated Visual Augmentation System” to boost soldiers’ awareness of their surroundings in order to spot targets and dangers.
According to the US Army, soldiers tested the gadgets last year at Fort Pickett, Virginia. It said the system could help troops gain an advantage “on battlefields that are increasingly urban, congested, dark, and unpredictable.” The US Army first started to trial prototype headsets through a $480m (£350m) contract in 2018, and concluded from this that the hardware could have applications for both training and combat.
In January, Congress passed a defence bill which would cut funding for the headset scheme; it is unclear how this contract stands in relation to this legislation.
In February, Microsoft president Brad Smith told the Senate’s Armed Services Committee that the headset could integrate features such as thermal night vision, facial recognition, and “real-time analytics” for use in combat. He also said that the HoloLens could help plan hostage recovery operations by generating a digital twin of the target building.
Microsoft told Reuters that the new contract is worth up to $21.88bn (£15.87bn) over the next decade, with a five-year base agreement that can be extended for another five years. Under the agreement, Microsoft will be able to mass-manufacture Hololens 2-like units for more than 120,000 soldiers in the Army Close Combat Force.
Microsoft also told Reuters that the headsets will be manufactured in the US.
Following the announcement of Microsoft’s initial HoloLens contract with the US Army, at least 94 employees petitioned company leadership to walk away from the deal and stop development of “any and all weapons technologies” that could turn real-world combat scenarios into video games.
The headsets deal is just one partnership between Microsoft and the Pentagon; last year Microsoft was confirmed as its partner in the JEDI cloud computing project worth $10bn ($7.3bn). This deal has been contested by Amazon, whose representatives have made claims of a flawed bidding process and filed a lawsuit over the contract.
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