Tag: Opinion
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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.
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