What Are The Benefits Of Having A Masters Degree
[00:00:00] Has anyone ever heard of a patent lawyer going back to school to bolster credentials? Everyone in the field seems to have their law degree last. I am at a large law firm doing patent work, mostly litigation. I love it, but I don't see a future for myself with the firm in-house without completing my masters and getting into some prosecution work--
What happens is most patent attorneys, as they go to law school after having been engineers for awhile. If you go to a good school or not, even if you go to any school and you get an engineering degree, you can typically get a pretty good, high paying job right out of college, or sometimes they'll get a master's degree. Those degrees pay very well. They can pay into the six figures right out of school.
And so people do that and they can make more money than a lot of attorneys coming out of law firms. So, I'm coming out of good law schools, right as out of undergraduate or graduate school. Then what happens is those same attorneys cite at some point that they want to get a law degree and then they get a law degree, then they typically will go to work in a law firm. They often start in smaller law firms because our grades aren't as good because you're going to school at night, or not going to the best law schools and so forth because they're still practicing engineering while they're doing that, and [00:01:00] then they go back to work. if you want to be a patent attorney or if you want to be in the field, most patent prosecutors want to become patent litigators. The reason is because there's more money being a patent litigator than prosecutor. Patent prosecution typically is doing patents for a flat fee. Whereas litigation obviously can be lots of billable hours and stuff involved. And so it can get very very expensive for and be very lucrative for law firms. I would recommend if you do want to stay in the field, that can be useful to have that degree because a lot of the larger law firms do like it when people have master's degrees and so forth or degrees, especially in electrical engineering. So, if you do want to do that you can do it and it will bolster your credentials. I don't know that you're held back, but if you're trying to bring in clients in that field they often will want someone that has those degrees as well. If you're interested, you should do it anyway. Even if you're working in a large law firm, when you're doing patent prosecution work, or patent litigation work right now, and you just want to take a year or two off and get an extra degree, you should.
I think that's a very positive [00:02:00] thing.
