Trainee recruitment

As a new trainee, you will be exposed to a broad range of work from the start. This is likely to include meeting inventors, drafting and filing patent applications and responding to examination reports issued from patent offices. As you progress, you will experience what it is like to defend our clients’ patents if challenged by a third party, and to attack patents belonging to our clients’ competitors, and will conduct hearings before the European Patent Office in Munich and the Hague. You may also be required to provide clients with freedom-to-operate and patent infringement opinions, and provide due diligence reports in advance of clients’ commercial negotiations or fund-raising.

Being a patent attorney is an incredibly rewarding profession. It is intellectually stimulating from a technical standpoint and can be challenging from a legal point of view. To become a fully qualified UK Chartered Patent Attorney (CPA) and European Patent Attorney (EPA), you are required to pass a number of examinations.

We will support you in preparing for these examinations through a structured training programme of internal tutorials and provides financial support for attendance at external courses and obtaining textbooks. We also provide generous study leave.

You will spend an introductory year learning the basic principles of intellectual property and office procedures before preparing to obtain a Certificate of Intellectual Property at the Queen Mary University of London. A further two years of training, including both internal and external components, will prepare you for the advanced examinations, covering drafting, amendment, patent practice, infringement and validity, legal opinions and patent opposition. Full qualification as both a UK and European Patent Attorney can be achieved within five years of joining us.

We are not currently recruiting trainee trade mark attorneys but please check our website periodically in case this changes. Details about what you could expect in terms of being a trainee trade mark attorney here at Venner Shipley can be found below.

We usually recruit trainee trade mark attorneys to begin their career with us in the autumn. Trainees are supervised by a senior fee earner and will spend their first year assisting with activities such as drafting search reports, preparing cost estimates, drafting responses to clients and examiners from UKIPO, CTM & WIPO, assisting with Trading Standards queries, attending client meetings and networking events. Trainees typically attend the Queen Mary, University of London Certificate of Intellectual property during their second year at the firm.

The Trade Mark Certificate differs from the Patent Certificate course in that attendance is less frequent and modular. Trainees attend Nottingham Law School the following year. Exams are taken throughout the course, which lasts for 2 years. During these 2 years trainees keep a diary of their work.

Salary increases are awarded for passing individual exams and for becoming qualified.