Ask HN: Who has changed careers from engineer to patent agent/lawyer?

I have the chance to move from my engineering career (full-stack robotics, software engineering, cloud background) to assist a law firm as a patent agent in my respective fields. Has anyone made this transition who can offer some input on how that transition played out and what they learned?

I've got a friend who made the transition.

Ultimately, he went to law school because he didn't feel there was career growth as just a patent agent... you've got to be a full-on attorney if you want growth in that marketplace.

I'm recalling a little bit of his rationale, but it seems that if you're curious about the law, it's a decent way to get exposure without the total commitment of law school, and you get paid while you're learning. But don't think of it as a "career transition" unless you're going totally into the law, it's more like an experiment to see if that's a direction you'd want to take. You'd still have to go to law school and pass the bar if you want to make a career out of it.

(advice is U.S.-based)

I'm curious. What was your experience working with attorneys? I heard an anecdote from a law student that the classmates were highly competitive about grades. Less anecdotally, there was a recent Financial Times article about corporate lawyers at one firm billing ~100 hours each week, and others sleeping only ~5 hours a night. It also reported a more accurate measurement from a survey:

"That level of exhaustion is taking a toll. In a survey of over 1,700 lawyers published in September, LawCare — a mental health charity in the sector — found almost 70 per cent had experienced ill health, either clinically or self-diagnosed, in the 12 months to January 2021, including depression and anxiety. According to the study, those aged between 26 and 35 were displaying the highest burnout scores — in part because of a lack of autonomy over their working lives. A fifth of respondents said they felt unable to cope." [0]

I'm guessing that law attracts competitive personalities who are willing to work long hours to make money, and that prospect might cause many lawyers to be high-strung.

[0] Paywalled, but the most relevant bit is quoted: https://www.ft.com/content/f4006248-eb05-49d2-a938-d70118c4c...

FWIW: IAAL and I also have a CS educational background but never really worked as an engineer outside of academia. I spent a few years in the middle of my legal career working primarily on patent prosecution, which is the work also done by patent agents.

I would personally not recommend patent prosecution to any lawyer or aspiring lawyer. Patent prosecutors hold a second class status within the legal profession, something I only realized when I started working in that area. The work is inherently challenging (in a bad way) in a typical law firm context resulting largely from the fact that it is generally fixed-fee work (with those fees generally having been driven down over a long period of time) in a context where lawyers have nominal billable hour expectations. You are under pressure to churn out patent applications in a relatively short period of time. I believe this is one of the main reasons for problems in patent quality seen particularly in the software space over the past two decades. The work itself is highly non-intellectual in nature.

Maybe the considerations are different for a patent agent who doesn't intend to go to law school. Some firms will pay for patent agents to go to law school part time which could be beneficial if the patent agent were to graduate and go into some other specialty (but I suspect that hardly ever happens).

Edit to add a related point: For anyone with a scientific or engineering background who goes to law school, I recommend resisting the temptation to take the USPTO's patent bar exam (this exam is also incidentally something patent agents take). It might seem to be a useful credential, but by becoming a registered patent attorney, you will get pigeonholed into a patent prosecution practice group within a law firm, which is problematic for the reasons I give above.