How to Make a Lot of Money as a Patent Attorney
[00:00:00] Do patent attorneys make a lot of money?
A patent attorney is interesting. Patent attorneys can make a lot of money. It depends on the firm you're working at and what kind of work you're doing. For those of you that aren't aware, most patent attorneys passed the patent bar. You have to pass the patent part of the practice before the patent trademark office. And what that means essentially is there's a different type of court where you write patents to, that approves patents and where you argue whether or not a patent is valid. So you have to be part of that.
Penn attorneys can make a lot of money but one of the problems is the work is very scientific in nature. It doesn't necessarily make use of a writing skills and so forth. So a lot of what's happening is that the costs are being pushed down for the work by competition from overseas. So a lot of the work patents are now written in China and India. That's happening a lot. And also, because it requires the same sort of scale, you don't need necessarily to be in a big city to write a patent. There are people in small towns in Colorado who are writing patents for Amazon. People like those.
Patent attorneys can make a lot of [00:01:00] money depending on their skill. I've known patent agents, that make half a million dollars or more per year, just pat agents. That means you can practice, write patents without even going to the patent with without even going to a law school.
But the big thing about a patent attorney is that they are quite rare because they have to have a scientific degree and there's certain types of classes they have to take in order to qualify to even take the patent bar. And then once they take the patent bar, they have to get the training to write patents.
So yeah, you can make a lot of money as a pen attorney but it's the same time, there are a lot of competition. It's becoming much harder. In most cases the attorneys that do things that are related to electrical engineering and computer circuits are much more employable than attorneys penetrating to biotech and mechanical and that sort of thing.
Patent attorneys can make a lot of money, but at the same time, it's a much more crowded field than it used to be. It didn't used to be very crowded at all. So when I started doing this in 2000 you would see, people being offered $50,000 starting bonus. It was absolutely insane because there [00:02:00] just weren't enough of them.
