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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]He strongly recommends that I take the PTO job, get the government to pay for my law degree, work for a few years at the PTO until I get about 10 years or so of experience and then move to private law. He thinks I can avoid the long hours that fresh law school grads have to put in and I can go into a law firm at a senior level. Admittedly he doesn't know anyone who has done that but has heard of a couple of people who have done that. [/quote]

I wouldn’t take advice from this guy—he’s a PTO lifer. Staying at the PTO for 10 years will not write you a ticket into a job at a good firm—it’s not like you’re going to be coming in with clients after being in a government job for a decade. Patent prosecution at big firms is still going to mean long hours and cutting your time  because clients don’t want to pay—it’s difficult to get your hours. Some PTO experience is good but being there too long can taint you.

What Kim of engineer are you? That makes a difference. [/quote]

I agree with this.  Examining and prosecution are different animals, and frankly, it is hard AF to get a big prosecution docket of your own and similarly hard AF to manage it profitably enough to actually get compensated (as you explain above).  I would consider a hybrid approach of going to the PTO and examining for a little while and doing some networking with some patent agents that are working at firms that pay for law school.  Finnegan used to call them student associates or whatever.  Then, consider doing that to avoid the debt (have the parents invest the money instead).  In this arrangement, which is not as common as it used to be for some reason, OP will get some amount of associate year credit when you convert over to a full time associate.

All that said, the golden age of patent law is long past us at this point, unless something dramatic happens.[/quote]

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