The Best Law Schools to Become a Patent Attorney in 2024.
I’m realizing that many people want to enter the patent field, but are like I was was when I first started and know very little about the area. I did not know any patent attorneys personally, and therefore had no clue what the job was like or what skills were needed. From the internet I understood you needed an science degree, and a law degree. I also knew which cities were great cities to practice patent law. Other than that I learned as I went along in this historically significant but notoriously difficult profession. In fact, it was the history that drew me to the profession. It fascinated me that Thomas Jefferson created what we know as the foundations of patent law, and inventors like Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers had patents that would go on to change the world.
Eventually, I started to look into law school and tried to determine which schools were right for me. My criteria was largely based upon which schools were going enrich my knowledge of Intellectual Property (IP) the best. Many lawyers will tell you just to go to the best school you get accepted into to, but that applies if you are looking for a traditional legal job. When I say traditional legal job, I mean something that requires litigation at some point or maybe even transactional law involving deals and contracts. I would saw patent law is not traditional, especially patent prosecution. Nothing you get tested on in the bar will involve patent law. That being said, my advice for patent litigators would be to go to the best school that has a great IP program because at some schools IP programs are not a priority. This will provide you optionis as you are in law school. For example, maybe you want to do patent litigation and you make that decision in law school. By being in a great school it gives sway with law firms, but if the school also has a great IP program it would provide you a much better experience and you will come out knowing about trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets in addition to patent law.
With that being said using that basic criteria for law schools above in more detail equates to this. Two different assessments, one for patent litigation and one for patent prosecution. One is a quantitative assessment which averages the rank of the overall law school and the IP program and one that considers the overall law school ranking, the IP ranking in which I will consider the faculty, the curriculum, location, and the job placement statistics. For both assessments, in case of a tie I will use cost of attendance to break the tie. In truth, an assessment such as this has never been done before.
The Top Ten Programs for Patent Litigation
Stanford
New York University
University of California Berkeley
Harvard University
University of Pennsylvania
Columbia University
Duke University
University of Michigan
UCLA
Virginia
Top Ten Programs for Patent Prosecution
Santa Clara University: 41/50
George Washington University: 40.5/50
University of California Berkeley: 40/50
University of New Hampshire: 39.5/50
George Mason University (Scalia): 39/50
University of Houston: 39/50
University of Texas at Austin: 38/50
American University: 38/50
Texas A&M: 37/50
Stanford: 37/50
In all honesty I was not surprised with these rankings with a few exceptions. I will talk about the exceptions first below.
D.C. Law Schools are a Great Option for Patent Prosecution
Due to the proximity of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, D.C. law schools have particular advantage. I do not think that D.C. is the most innovative city, but you can not beat being next to the patent office. You can meet with the examiner in person (or used to before everything went remote). All of the D.C. schools on the list (and there are three of them) have good or great IP curriculums so you will indeed be enriched by the added focus on patents. I do not think I understood this when I was applying to law schools just how much of an advantage it to be close to the patent office. There are an increased number of IP firms that probably would not be in D.C. if not for the fact it was the U.S. capital. It should be absolutely a consideration for you if you know you want to do patent prosecution.
University of New Hampshire Had the Best IP Curriculum for Patents
If you have not had a look at the curriculum for UNH Law School, you should see it for yourself. The list below is not exhaustive, but it contains most of the classes they offer in the area of Patents.
Notice how the school even offers courses on inter partes review, which has become more and more important at the USPTO over the years. They even offer intellectual property management, which is how one manages a portfolio of patents, and possibly trademarks and copyrights to monetize them.
Santa Clara University is Great for Patent Prosecutors Only
Let’s say you are divided between patent prosecution and litigation, you should choose Berkeley over Santa Clara because they are a very respected law school and they have a program that is geared toward patent lawyers. In other words, at Berkeley employers will simply assume that you will have more potential as a litigator because you go to Berkeley. That’s not true, but that is how it is. After all, law school is geared toward litigation or going to court. Relatively, Santa Clara Law is not as respected as a law school overall than Berkeley. It just the truth. Berkeley is a T14 school while Santa Clara is ranked 158.
It’s important to understand that when you do any type of litigation, what employers are going to look for first is where you went to law school. For patent prosecution employers care more about your technical background and experience. Both Berkeley and Santa Clara will greatly enrich your IP and patent learning experience, but when you go to Berkeley, you are going to face little resistance to get hired at firms for litigation roles or anything really. This is not to say that Santa Clara does not produce patent litigators, they produce many of them, but you will see that 15-20% of the class work at the largest firms, which is great measure of what the job outlook is in my opinion.
Let me explain, working at large firms opens a lot of doors and it is attractive to a lot of students who are not doing public interest. Oftentimes, if you have the opportunity to work at a large firm you would go for it. That’s not to say these jobs are better, as these jobs are often are stressful and very challenging. Think of it this way, big firm lawyers are paid so much more they raise the average salary of the class, and schools where a large amount of students work in these firms will cause the average salary of the class to be higher, is an important metric of job outlook.
In my mind, job outlook in law school mainly equates to the ease of forging the career that you want to have and if everybody is forging the career they want in your class then your school in my mind has great job outlook. Stated simply, if the your peers are easily getting jobs in the area that is hardest to get a job, you bet your bottom dollar it applies to the rest of the student body in whatever they are pursuing.
I myself went to Santa Clara Law, and I know the school produces a disportionate amount of big law lawyers. Although, it is not is a large compared to many of the schools that are considered the most prestigious on the lists. I do not like how lawyers seem to be attracted to prestige, but it is a reality.
Santa Clara has a very good IP curriculum and there is nearly everything a patent prosecutor would need to be successful. For example, tuition is relatively not as high, and the location can not be better being in the Silicon Valley as there is much inventing going on at tech companies and universities.
As an aside, some of you must be wondering why I chose Santa Clara. I chose Santa Clara because they had this engineer to patent attorney program that I was interested in doing. Basically you would work part time at a law firm and go to law school as part of designed program. Although, by the time I got to the school they discontinued the program.
Explanation of Rankings
As I said above, the patent litigation rankings are simple as it was simply the US News World Report ranking for the overall law school and IP program averaged. This amounted to the top ten looking like the list of T14 or the top 14 law schools. This does not mean you get a great patent learning experience at some of the schools listed. For example, Harvard’s IP curriculum particularly on patents is not very good. They only offer a few basic classes. Although, if you are at Harvard, and you want to do patent litigation then the firms are going to be drawn to you regardless. That is not really true for a school that is lowly ranked overall, but is highly ranked in IP. Things like class rank, undergraduate background, and experience really matter at such a school.
The patent prosecution rankings are much more complicated. It is a qualitative assessment, so in the end I am making judgement calls for scores based upon what I see from the school. Below I have posted a Excel spreadsheet with the tallied score for each of schools I ranked for patent prosecution.
Table of 15 Highly Rated IP Schools Evaluated for Patent Prosecution
How this rating system works I take the overall ranking which takes into account everything US News could think of, and I weigh more heavily the things that should be more important for patent prosecutors. So the IP ranking score was 10 for the top 5 programs and the scores varied based upon where they ranked in groups of 5’s. It is difficult to get into the top 5, so the next 5 were given a score of 8, and varied by 0.5 for every 5 spots in the rankings. Cost of attendance will vary per person, but I am mainly considering tuition. For example compared to Berkeley, Santa Clara’s tuition is lower, but you could get varying cost results based upon your living expenses. The Bay Area is expensive in general, but it is possible to find cheaper arrangements off campus. Again I focused on tuition.
For IP curriculum I researched the depth of the IP curriculum paying special attention to patents. The faculty were considered as well apparent resources of faculty directed toward IP and patents. Location for patent prosecution is based upon the understood amount of work available in the city or surrounding region. For example, University of New Hampshire is not located in a city known for generating a lot of patent work, but they are not too far away from Boston and New York which are good sources of work.
Job Outlook I talked about before, in all honesty the schools with best job outlook are generally the highly ranked schools with schools like Houston and Santa Clara punching above their weight.
*Note I looked at all ranked IP programs for cost of attendance and location as those things are not hard to assess. After a certain point I realized with the lower ranked IP programs that if the cost of attendance was not low and the location was not great, they had no way cracking the top ten. I picked the candidates that had potential to produce high scores under my criteria for the sake of efficiency. The main reason I looked at Washington University in St. Louis is out of curiosity, I did not think they would crack the top ten and I was pleasantly surprised by the curriculum, and the students are highly desired there as well according to their employment statistics.
Conclusion
You should consider what you want to practice, patent litigation or prosecution, before you go to law school as it could help you aide your thought process in selecting a school. If you want to be patent litigator consider going to first list of top 10 schools in the article because those schools will open the most doors for you. Understand that prestige of the school makes a difference to employers in litigation. In prosecution, you should decide what metrics matter most to you and your should base a decision upon that. Based upon the metrics I selected, the top ten schools were not all top law schools. Instead they were schools that were cost friendly located in good practice areas with a well thought out IP Curriculum in most circumstances.
A longer than normal article, but I hope it is helpful among those who want to be patent attorneys. Remember to see my posts about the patent bar and law school as well.
Also, any questions or requests to see more schools evaluated just let me know by subscribing to my posts or emailing me directly at the address below.
