Employment and Salary: Patent Attorney

Hello all

In my last three blogs, I will be looking at employment statistics of the kind i've described over the last few posts for the three main fields I've been studying. As before, I'm going to start off today with patent law, which is the most likely field a scientist who gets a law degree would go into.

First up in our statistics is absolute number of jobs. According to the U.S. Patent Office, there are 41,800 patent attorneys on register. This is a vast over-estimate, as many of those registered are dead or retired. This patent law blog puts the number of active attorneys at a much lower figure of around 26,000, or possibly fewer. Compare this to the total number of lawyers, which the Bureau of Labor and Statistics puts at around 759,800, and you see just how relatively small a field IP law is and why patent and IP attorneys are in such high demand. In fact, since not all types of IP lawyers require a science degree, the actual number of those active attorneys WITH a science degree is even lower. This means that it's potentially quite easy to land a job as a patent attorney.

Next up is absolute job growth. For the overall field of law, the BLS puts the number of jobs added between 2012 and 2022 at ~74,800, with a field growth rate of around average speed.. However, over 40,000 law jobs are added per year, meaning that by 2022 there will be a massive surplus of law students and a massive shortage of jobs. As for patent law itself, I can't find many statistics, but the general impression I get is that growth is slow but not as slow as law in general.

Finally, salary breakdown

I couldn't find the exact sort of breakdown I described in the last post. But, I found a website which compiles estimates from many different firms. The best one of these estimates was from Salary.com and it is reproduced here

• Patent Attorney I (JD + 0-2 years of experience) – $80,683 (average); low 41K and high 128K
• Patent Attorney II (JD + 2-5 years of experience) – $123,276 (average); low 88K and high 179K.
• Patent Attorney III (JD + 5-8 years of experience) – $146,262 (average); low 115K and high 195K.
• Patent Attorney IV (JD + 8 years or more of experience) – $170,971 (average); low 140K and high 214K.
• Top Patent Attorney (JD + 15 or more years of experience) – $210,437 (average); low 145K and high 270K.
• Patent Agent II (Bachelors + 2-5 years of experience) – $84,509 (average); low 62K and high 118K.

So, while this doesn't list different salaries for those with a master's degree, it still provides a useful range  of salary info

Next time I'll do the same thing for business