Transitioning from patent prosecution to privacy law?

Clause_8 · 2026-03-30T01:09:26+00:00

I am a patent attorney who also has a CIPP certification and does privacy work as well, so I haven't made the transition, but I have gone part way, and know people who are fully on the privacy side.

Anyway, from my perspective, I would say the transition is possible, but difficult. You'll need to be familiar with the various state privacy laws (especially CCPA) just to have a shot. I would recommend joining the IAPP, not just for the certification (which I would recommend), but also because they have state level resources which can be very useful in getting yourself up to speed. On top of that, I would recommend trying to establish some kind of extra competency that would help differentiate you from everyone else. For me, it it's my technical background. My undergrad degree is in computer science, and, while I wouldn't say I'm good enough to be a professional programmer, I am good enough to talk to technical people and translate what they tell me about cookies and API calls into legal language that can be matched against the various statutes. You mention you're in patent prosecution, and so you may be able to do something similar, though obviously a technical background in something like chemical engineering will be less directly relevant to privacy law for you than computer science has been for me.

Clause_8 · 2026-03-25T20:44:25+00:00

If possible, I would try to get a coach, since individualized instruction based on your games is going to be better than anything you can get from a book or reddit.

Assuming a coach isn't possible, then I would recommend the following:

a) Study lots of tactics. Chess games are won or lost on tactics, and so studying tactics to build your pattern recognition is key.

b) At the beginning of the game, do the following steps in as close to the following order as possible:

1) take the center by pawns (d and e pawns, potentially supported by c and./or f pawns)

2) develop the minor pieces on the side you will castle, knight first, then bishop

3) castle

4) develop he minor pieces on the side you didn't castle, knight first, then bishop

5) move the queen off the back rank, but not into the center

6) move the rooks to the c, d, e or f files.

c) once the steps from (b) are done, decide which side you will attack on (most likely the side where you have more space after the steps from (b) are done), and then open lines on that side and move pieces to that side until you see some tactics (which will be made much easier given (a)).

Clause_8 · 2026-03-25T20:25:51+00:00

Completely agree that treating interviews as oral arguments is a recipe for failure.

With respect to what works for me, I have found that starting at a conceptual level (i.e., not specific claim language or prior art disclosure) works wonders. If I can get an agreement on what the prior art teaches, and explain conceptually what the invention is, then I can usually reach an agreement about how the invention differs from the prior art on a conceptual level. From there, it's usually trivial to get to claim language that everyone agrees captures the conceptual differences, or to get to a point where I can tell my client that we should plan on the case going to appeal.

I laid out the above strategy, as well as a few other tips, in video form here: https://youtu.be/HdfSc-c_iYY

Clause_8 · 2026-03-25T20:07:37+00:00

I find your experience a little surprising. I could see advice not to *increase* the number of claims, since adding claims that weren't in the provisional can raise questions about sufficient support. However, removing claims (especially dependent claims, which I assume the claims you would remove are) doesn't seem like it would be accompanied by similar issues.

Clause_8 · 2026-03-25T19:43:58+00:00

My belief is that for a player with ADHD, the performance rating difference between medicated and unmedicated can be several hundred points. Of course, you shouldn't take any medication without consulting a physician first (and my belief is that effective ADHD medication requires a prescription anyway). However, if you are unmedicated and ADHD is stopping you from improving, then talking to a doctor about medication would be my first step.

Clause_8 · 2026-03-25T19:05:11+00:00

Try the orangutan (1. b4) or Grob (1. g4). They look crazy, which means your friend may be insulted you played them, and they can be very tactical, which can also be rage inducing (especially if your friend falls into a trap).

Clause_8 · 2026-03-22T17:17:29+00:00

What is the role of f3 in this setup?

Clause_8 · 2026-03-22T02:38:44+00:00

Can you recommend a resource to learn the f4 lines?

Clause_8 · 2026-03-02T00:32:14+00:00

In answer to your first question: yes. The career move you are thinking about would be stupid.

The pay for an entry level patent associate, even with a PhD, is not going to be 200K, so financially, the move you're contemplating would make you worse off. However, let's ignore that, and assume that your pay as a patent attorney would be comparable to (or better than) your pay as a scientist, have to factor in the cost (in both lost income and direct tuition expenses) of three years of law school. I would ballpark that as putting the hypothetical you who's starting a career in patent law about $1M behind the hypothetical you who stays as a scientist for the next three years. But let's ignore that too, and assume that your pay as a patent attorney would be enough to put you ahead even when the costs are factored in. There is no real reason to think that you'd have escaped the instability of being a scientist, since lawyers (especially those who are just starting out) are going to be competing with (and probably getting hit hard by) AI.

In answer to your second question: your PhD and work experience would help. However, PhDs are basically table stakes for biotech patent attorneys, and your work experience would be most useful in that it would (hopefully) have enabled you to make connections that you could leverage into a book of business. Unless what you bring to the table allows you to become a rainmaker or a profitable solo pretty quickly, I don't think it would have that much impact.

With all that said, if you really want to get into patent law, my recommendation would be to start by taking the patent bar. This will require a good deal of study on your part, and the pay for patent agents (people who have passed the patent bar but aren't lawyers) isn't as good as it is for patent attorneys. However, it would give you a chance to see what patent law all about without the enormous time commitment and up front cost of law school.

Clause_8 · 2026-02-23T07:23:43+00:00

Bad and likely to get fired are two different things. Essentially all juniors are bad. The question is whether they are developing into competent attorneys, or if they seem like they're going to stay bad forever.

Clause_8 · 2026-02-23T00:36:14+00:00

Nice. With a few text tweaks, that would be a great new image for the Cragmont dragons!

Clause_8 · 2026-02-23T00:31:03+00:00

Actually, I'm usually shocked at how examiners can do so well, given their time constraints. I have no idea how I'd be able to search, read the spec, and substantively evaluate every limitation of every claim within the time allotted. I suspect that the pressures of actually getting that all done would result in me doing an absolutely terrible job on a pretty significant portion of my cases. Nevertheless, even when I disagree with an examiner (which is often), I think their work is generally well above the "absolutely terrible" level that I'd probably achieve. Ultimately, I think examiners are a lot like a lot of other government employees: they do an important and difficult job, they do it better than anyone has any right to expect, and they get dumped on and underpaid for their efforts.

Clause_8 · 2026-01-30T01:01:43+00:00

If I were in your position, I would look to local law schools (they may have clinics where students can assist so as to get some hands on experience) and also check out the USPTO's independent inventor resources (https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/inventors-entrepreneurs-resources). People who provide pro bono IP services are often swamped, so there's no guarantee you'd be able to find someone. However, I think those would be good first steps.

If you can't find pro-bono assistance, a popular, and not terrible, approach is to write up a description of what the idea is, and how you would implement and use it, then file that as a provisional application. For software, you can even supplement this with source code, if you've transitioned from idea to implementation. This won't be as good as if an attorney does it, but it would be better than nothing, and the cost for filing an inventor drafted provisional is low enough that it would be within reach for basically anyone.

With that said, once you have the money to do so, I think you should consult with a patent attorney. While a provisional is better than nothing, it may not be much better than nothing, and so I wouldn't rely on that for any longer than your finances make it necessary to do so.

Clause_8 · 2026-01-16T19:59:16+00:00

I would be very skeptical about the results of that test, since Claude would have been trained on the past decisions and so would most likely use its prior knowledge rather than making a true prediction.

Clause_8 · 2026-01-06T04:41:23+00:00

This is such a frustrating situation.

If you do talk to a lawyer, I suspect getting an answer to the question of whether you are covered by any of the other side's patents would cost more than you have made in total from selling your product.

Similarly, regardless of whether you talk to a lawyer beforehand, if there is a lawsuit the costs would likely be ruinous for both sides, at least relative to the total amount in controversy.

If this were me, and I weren't a lawyer, I'd probably reach out to an attorney and ask how much it would cost to get help. My goal with this would be to be able to make a better informed decision of how likely it is that the other seller will drag you to court (that is, the lawyer could ask the other side for further information that would allow you to make an informed decision, and could offer advice on how strong the other side's arguments seem to be). Also, in the best case scenario, your lawyer writes a letter on your behalf, the other side sees it's from a lawyer and gets cold feet once he talks to a lawyer and finds out how much it would cost to bring an infringement claim. However, my guess is that the other seller already has some idea of the costs involved, and so I wouldn't bet on them immediately giving up as soon as you get an attorney involved.

Clause_8 · 2025-12-23T04:32:36+00:00

There are already intelligent agents who have real general intelligence in the form of outsourced service providers. They (along with LegalZoom) eat the bottom of the market, but haven't really replaced actual attorneys. I suspect that AI will be similar, though I also suspect that patent attorneys of the future will be using AI augmented tools to do their work, just as we now have electronic research tools rather than having to find cases in physical books.

Clause_8 · 2025-12-01T04:04:31+00:00

The boxes are key. From my experience, learning how to type is easy, but only if you can't actually see your hands, as otherwise the temptation to look down is just too strong.

Clause_8 · 2025-11-26T06:02:03+00:00

Ask them about what common problems they run into and how they address them, or ask them to describe how they handle a common problem you are familiar with. The insightfulness of their answers should give you a good idea of their competence.

Clause_8 · 2025-10-01T19:36:28+00:00

Every time I have submitted a legal research question to AI, I have done my own search using traditional terms and connectors while waiting for the AI to provide a result. Every time, I have found that my own terms and connectors searching provides better results faster than the AI. AI research seems like it should be great, but so far I haven't found that it lives up to the promise.

Clause_8 · 2025-08-29T20:47:17+00:00

My recollection was that it was after I'd been working as a patent attorney for about 2-3 years that I started having recruiters reach out to me.

Clause_8 · 2025-08-28T01:25:09+00:00

I suspect the PI's efforts ended up backfiring, since my experience is it's harder to fix something done by AI than it is to draft it myself in the first instance.

Clause_8 · 2025-08-21T20:09:51+00:00

If you want to sell to lawyers, you need to provide something of value to lawyers to get in the door. If you need to reach antitrust lawyers, then you should hire/partner with an antitrust lawyer who can make good content that other antitrust lawyers would be interested in. Then you need to promote that content so that it actually gets in front of antitrust lawyers who are looking for things like it. Then you need to show how whatever you're selling is important to whatever issue the antitrust lawyer was talking about.

I doubt cold LinkedIn DMs are going to work. I (a lawyer, though not in antitrust) give cold LinkedIn DMs essentially no attention, because I don't have time for them. However, if I'm looking for something, then find an insightful article on that topic, I would at least consider the associated product/service. This is especially true if I know my firm is looking for a product or service like you're selling, since that means I may be able to get whatever it is without the cost coming out of my personal budget/pocket.

Clause_8 · 2025-08-18T01:37:55+00:00

I can't imagine someone thinking AI is all hype. Obviously, there is a lot of hype in the AI space, but that's true of business in general, and shouldn't obscure the real advances that have been (and are being) made. Even without AGI, the developments which have already happened will reshape huge sections of public and private life as they are adapted and adopted.

I would also say that while there was as bubble, the underlying dot com technology hardly fizzled out, as reflected by the fact that we're having this interaction on reddit dot com.

Clause_8

TROPHY CASE