<p>There is a multi-year long thread about patent law “Overview of patent law …” Read it.</p>
<p>I am a patent attorney and have been practicing exclusively in the field for over 28 years. To be a patent attorney you do not need economics, micro- or macro-. You do not need to have taken courses in history, math, human behavior, social interaction, or diverse cultures around the world.</p>
<p>You WILL need a great deal of education in your chosen field of science. You do not NEED a MS or PhD, just the basics that will enable you to understand the new scientific developments in the field. However, you may lose out on a job prospect to someone with a higher degree than yours.</p>
<p>As for me, I did not know that I wanted to be a lawyer when I started college, but I liked science, so I was a science major in college. I switched majors in college and in the process of searching for the appropriate new major I ended up taking courses in many scientific fields. Near the end of college, I had no idea what to do with my science education, so I went to law school. At the end of law school, there was a recession, and I could not get a job, so I went back to school and got a master’s degree in a science field, thereafter, jobs were a plenty for me.</p>
<p>My general scientific education has helped me immensely in my patent lawyer career. It has helped me do patent application work and patent litigation work. Virtually all of my work as a patent lawyer is completely different scientifically that what I learned in college, but in college I learned the scientific basics which enabled me to understand the small improvements that are the stuff of patents. That education also made me not to fear any of the scientific issues that have come up in my work. I knw that with some effort, I will be able to understand them.</p>
<p>Although one does not “need” any particular education beyond science to be a good patent lawyer, it’s a good idea to learn in college as much as you can in as many fields as you can. For example, because I took an accounting course in college (really boring), dealing with accounting issues in a patent litigation is not a daunting task for me. Also, because of my broad general non-science education, I have enough knowledge of other things so that I do not look like an idiot to clients and others. And the most important thing to learn besides the science if one wants to be a patent lawyer is to learn how to express yourself in writing and orally. If you can’t do that, you will never get anywhere in the business.</p>
<p>Years ago in the small trade school that I attended for college, the school’s management began talking to alumni engineers and learned that alumni were dead-ended in their corporate jobs in technical positions, not rising to upper level management. Instead, alumni of that other college up river leap frogged over the techies and became the upper level managers. So my trade school determined that the distribution requirements at the school had to change to include courses in writing and speaking. Things have improved for alumni. The moral is, learn to write and speak so that people understand what you are trying to say, and this advice holds whether you end up as a lawyer or an engineer. You don’t want to take writing courses when you are 40 years old.</p>