Just how badly do you want to be a patent agent?
Paper A: write a patent application based on a mechanical invention. Can be anything from roller skates to a satellite dish for RVs. Avoid the scary three pieces of prior art. One piece will be particularly pesky. Typically no short answers, except if you get to the end of the four hours and realize you forgot to write an abstract.
Paper B: typical question on validity. An incredibly foolish patent holder who has screwed up on a variety of fronts asks you to write an opinion on the validity of their patent. In real life, you would never write any of this down but would pick up the phone instead. In the exam, you can be as honest as you like, but you have to download everything in your head on claim construction and validity attacks first. Whoops, you're out of time! Short answers focus on timelines, US patent law, priority dates, and other bits of trivia just to keep you entirely frazzled..
Paper C: you get an Office Action or requisition from a Canadian patent application you didn't write in the first place. Now you have to defend all the stupid errors made by the original drafter. This is actually quite a realistic scenario that you run into every day at a typical law firm. Then there's a whole bunch of short answer questions about jurisprudence that you read about a few times but have no hope of remembering right now. Too bad those "easy" points weren't so easy...
Paper D: Infringement question, a lot like the validity question above except different. Again, you can get marks for downloading the contents of your overloaded brain regarding Free World Trust and claim construction, essentiality, and the horrible things you can do to the bozos who dare infringe your patent. Oh yes, don't forget the short answers.
Writing four papers in a week is an endurance test. I remember after the third day of the 2003 sitting, I was in despair because I had forgotten to double space my answer sheets. I did not fail on that basis, by the way, but because I wrote a crappy Paper A. Let's hope I did better in 2004!.
September /October 2003
The results: an inscrutable letter about your scores on the four papers. It is difficult to establish whether you passed anything or not from the text, but there is a statement at the end about having failed the exam unless steps are taken within one month of the posting of the results in the mail.
The Appeal Process
January 2004
It was only after I faxed my carefully written Appeal that I remembered that some old instructions I had seen said that the request for review must bear no identification except for my candidate number. I'll never know if this is why my appeal failed (I did resend the Appeal with no identification half a day later, well before the deadline). Still, my results on appeal were a curt "no change in status" despite Herculean arguments in defence of my rather pathetic attempt to claim a mailing tube for stinging insects. The fact that my Appeal letter was better than my original attempt in Paper A failed to move the Examining Board, by the way.
October 2004
I find that I can burn all my study materials and -- what's this? I have to pay $350 a year to stay on the Register, as well as the same amount to be a member of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada? Not to mention over a thousand a year for liability insurance? Holy frijoles, I had better get out there and write some applications!!
March 2006
I have left the IP firm and have joined a wonderful biotechnology company called OncoGenex Technologies Inc. The technologies is antisense, so once again (photosensitizers, liposomes, kinases, small molecule kinase inhibitors) I get to learn all about a complete new technology. This is the life!
