About Ashley Wragg: I’m Ashley, a recently-qualified European Patent Attorney. I’ve been with Appleyard Lees for four years, working as part of the chemistry team and based in the Leeds office.
The Mercer Review was published recently in the CIPA Journal, a publication produced by the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys. The review examined the requisite training and assessments for qualification as a U.K. registered patent attorney, as well as continued development post-qualification.
The Mercer Review provides an excellent overview of current processes and gives interesting recommendations for their continued improvement. Once attorneys are qualified, I think there is a risk of detachment between qualified attorneys and trainees (including between the examiners and candidates). As a trainee, it really fills me with hope to see such a thorough review of the training and assessment of trainees, and a recognition that current systems can be refined.
The review suggests changes to improve current programmes. The report is split into five chapters:
- Skills and Knowledge
- Training
- Assessment
- Governance
- Summary of recommendations
For those who have the time (and interest!) it is well worth the read.
Trainees must take several exams to become qualified in the profession. In the U.K., there are four foundation exams leading to part-qualification (which can also be achieved by attending a university-based course) and four final exams, including the dreaded FD4 (Infringement and Validity paper), which has gained some notoriety in recent years, for its low pass rates.
By the end of the process, trainee patent attorneys are experts in the training and examination systems.
Any trainee can tell you that the exams have changed significantly over the years – especially recently. Further 2020/2021 changes driven by COVID shifted the exam to an online format, with an online proctoring system in 2021. Although the call for evidence for the Review closed in February 2020, just before the COVID pandemic really took effect, the Review still provides analysis that is insightful and impactful.
Some interesting points raised by the Review include:
Final exams should focus on assessing core skills: Recently, more obscure topics have crept into different exams without much justification. In my opinion, this results in exams being diluted. This is not just in the U.K. – the March 2021 European exams also contained some arbitrary inter-exam creep.
Exams should be open book (or semi-open book): For FD1 (P2), the advanced legal paper, this would be a big change. In FD1, marks are given for applying the law, rather than reciting it; however, I’ve found that the exam still requires test-takers to recite the law because this provides the list of topics to talk about to get each available mark. A semi-open book policy is an attractive solution to the common grumble of candidates who object to having to regurgitate parts of the Act that, day-to-day, an attorney would look-up.
I would however be concerned that exam time might be shortened to prevent candidates looking-up answers for each and every question, which may further increase time pressure in an exam which should be assessing core skills, rather than how fast the test taker can grab marks.
Exams should be less bloated, and return to a length of four hours: The time allowed to complete the final exams recently has been increased.
Timing of the FD4 increased from four hours to five in 2010, and resulted in more content being added to the exam. Due to the exams being online, the time for FD4 was again extended to nearly six hours. A problem is that FD4 requires candidates to give a full infringement opinion, and the imposed time limit is a simple method to make the exam harder.
Should the exam content remain large, I think an alternative option could be to split the exam into more reasonable-length chunks, but this itself has its issues in terms of how to divide the exam.
