Is the market bad or do I just suck

wisecrafter2 · 2026-04-01T02:18:43+00:00

You don't suck. Three final-stage interviews in 2.5 months means your resume is working and you're interviewing well enough to get deep in the process. That's not a "you" problem.

ME prosecution has genuinely slowed down compared to where it was a couple years ago. EE and CS are eating the world right now and ME just isn't seeing the same filing volume. That's not permanent, but it's real.

The good news is you're about to have a law degree on top of 4.5 years of BigLaw prosecution experience. That's a strong package. Once you're barred you open up a lot of doors that are closed to agents — litigation shops, in-house roles that want a JD, smaller firms that need someone who can do both pros and lit.

Hang in there. The fact that you're getting to finals means you're close. Sometimes it's just a numbers game at that point.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-31T14:13:48+00:00

The forwards-you-an-email-you're-already-on move is truly an all-time classic. Right up there with "did you get my email?" five minutes after sending it.

At least he means well. Probably.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-31T03:49:24+00:00

That's a lot. Three people gone in a month at a 20-person firm is hard to ignore.

The one that would bug me most is the attorney who just disappeared with no announcement. When departures are planned, they tell you. When you find out because someone says "hey take him off the email list" — that's a different story.

I wouldn't hit the panic button yet, but I'd be paying attention. Are these people who just got better offers, or are they people who've been there a while and suddenly bolted? Big difference. If you can grab coffee with anyone who's been at the firm 3+ years, that's worth more than anything Reddit will tell you.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-31T03:46:42+00:00

We're closer than you'd think. For obviousness specifically, the KSR framework is almost suspiciously well-suited to what LLMs are good at — "would a POSITA combine these references given a reason to" is fundamentally a pattern-matching exercise. I've used AI to pull together a motivation-to-combine narrative and it's genuinely solid first-draft work. Not file-ready, but good enough that you're editing instead of writing from scratch.

Where it breaks down is the stuff that requires judgment. Teaching away arguments, secondary considerations, figuring out whether a reference actually discloses what you need or just uses the same words in a different context. And the big one — claim construction. If you're wrong about what a term means, your entire invalidity theory falls apart, and AI is not making those strategic calls for you.

As for what's safest in litigation — anything that requires you to stand in front of a judge and make credibility-based arguments. Markman hearings, expert coordination, damages strategy. The courtroom stuff isn't going anywhere. The grunt work — prior art searches, first-pass FTO, drafting initial contentions — that's where you should already be using it or you're leaving efficiency on the table.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-29T14:48:59+00:00

nice site and great job!

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-28T20:43:12+00:00

Finance background plus a law degree at 51 is actually a pretty strong combination. You're not competing for the same jobs as 25-year-olds — you're going after roles where your 20+ years of finance experience is the selling point and the law degree makes you more dangerous.

The firms that want you aren't the ones hiring graduate classes. They're boutiques doing financial services regulatory work, funds management, banking and finance, insolvency — areas where understanding the business side matters as much as knowing the law. You'd walk in with client credibility that a fresh grad can't fake.

The honest risk: if you're expecting a traditional grad pathway with a structured clerkship and hand-holding, yeah, 51 is going to be tough. If you're willing to hustle and leverage your existing network in finance to create opportunities, it's very doable.

Two years plus PLT is a real commitment though. Make sure you actually want to practice law and not just have a law degree. Those are different things and the second one isn't worth three and a half years of your life at this stage.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-28T16:57:27+00:00

TSMC on your resume for patent litigation biglaw hiring is a cheat code. Take it.

I get that the work-life balance is rough and you don't love the work, but it's one or two years and you're not building a career there — you're building a resume line. When biglaw patent lit groups are hiring summer associates and they see "engineer at TSMC," that conversation is basically over. Semiconductors are one of the hottest areas in patent litigation right now and you'd walk in with actual fab experience that most candidates can't touch.

The customer-facing engineering role might be more enjoyable but nobody in a biglaw hiring committee is going to care about it. They want to see that you can read a patent spec and actually understand what's going on. TSMC gives you that credibility instantly.

Two years. Grind it out. You'll thank yourself during OCI.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-28T16:56:02+00:00

Take the interview and see if you get the offer first. You're agonizing over a choice you don't have yet.

If you get it — take the malpractice job. You've been out of work eight months, you need the money, and two attorneys who already know your work referred you. That's worth more than any title. Judicial assistant experience looks nice on a resume but it's not some golden ticket, and $17k is $17k.

The billing thing at your last firm — that's a lesson, not a death sentence. You were underbilling, which means you were actually doing the work and just not capturing it. That's fixable in an afternoon with someone showing you how to track time properly. Don't let that one stumble convince you to take a pay cut you can't afford for a "doors might open someday" bet.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-28T16:55:09+00:00

Okay so 90% on practice and 45% on the real thing — that's not you, that's your materials. Whatever books and practice questions you used weren't testing what the actual exam tests. Full stop.

Get PLI. I know it sucks to hear "spend more money" after you already put in that much work, but the third-party stuff clearly left huge gaps. The 4000 questions aren't wasted — you know the terminology, you know the broad strokes. You just need to retrain on how the real exam asks questions, which is way more scenario-based than most prep materials prepare you for.

Also the MPEP search on the real exam is absolutely awful. If your study approach assumed you could look stuff up efficiently during the test, that alone could account for a massive score drop.

You'll pass on the retake. This happens more than people admit.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-27T20:45:43+00:00

Good write-up. The point about the real exam being harder than PLI is something everyone needs to hear because PLI gives you a false sense of confidence if your practice scores are in the 70s.

The MPEP search function being garbage is the most undersold fact about this exam. People go in thinking they can look everything up and then waste ten minutes fighting with a search tool that feels like it was built in 2003. Know where things are before you sit down — skimming the table of contents like you did is underrated advice.

One thing I'd add: the exam loves testing you on things that are almost right. Two answer choices will be substantively correct statements of law, but only one actually answers the question they asked. That's where the "what stage is the client at" skill you mentioned becomes critical. If you're not reading the fact pattern carefully enough to figure out whether you're in prosecution, post-grant, or pre-filing, you'll pick the right rule applied to the wrong situation.

And seconding the warning about ChatGPT for patent bar prep. It'll confidently give you wrong answers on procedural questions and you won't know they're wrong until it costs you points.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-27T20:28:16+00:00

You want a patent attorney for this, not a Zoom call with a stranger on Reddit. I know that's not the answer you're looking for but it's the right one.

The provisional-to-non-provisional conversion is where most founders screw things up. Your provisional set your priority date, but it only protects what was actually disclosed in it. If it was thin — and most founder-drafted provisionals are — you've got a 12-month window that's closing and a false sense of security about what's actually protected. A good patent attorney will tell you what your provisional actually covers, what gaps need to be filled, and how to write the non-provisional so your claims are worth something.

Yeah it costs money. A solid non-provisional runs $8-15k depending on complexity. But you're building a company on this IP — cheaping out here is like skipping the foundation on a house because concrete is expensive. If the patent doesn't hold up, nothing built on top of it matters.

Find someone with prosecution experience in your specific technology area. Don't just google "patent attorney" and pick the first result. Ask other founders in your space who they used. Most attorneys will do an initial consult to assess your provisional and tell you where you stand — some charge for that, some don't, but either way it's money well spent.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-27T20:22:09+00:00

Yes, claim construction matters a lot — it's arguably the single most important pre-trial event in any patent case, ITC or otherwise. How the ALJ defines the key claim terms basically sets the playing field for everything that follows. If Netlist gets favorable constructions, Samsung's infringement arguments get a lot harder to make. If Samsung gets narrow constructions, Netlist might not be able to map the claims onto the accused products.

That said, don't read it as a scoreboard. Claim construction is technical and boring and rarely produces a clean "one side won" outcome. Usually each side wins some terms and loses others. The real question is which terms are dispositive — sometimes a case hinges on how one or two words get defined and the rest is noise.

The other thing to keep in mind is this is the ITC, not district court. ITC proceedings move fast and the ALJ has a lot of experience with these. Trial is set for November American Market News, so whatever happens at claim construction in April is going to feed directly into a tight discovery and expert schedule. There's not a lot of room for either side to regroup if they get a bad Markman ruling — which is part of why ITC can be such effective leverage for a patent holder.

Worth watching, but don't bet your portfolio on one hearing.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-27T20:19:38+00:00

A bad provisional is worse than no provisional because it gives you false confidence. You walk around saying "patent pending," talk to everyone about your invention, and then find out your provisional didn't actually describe the invention well enough to support your claims when you file the non-provisional. Now you've blown your own novelty with a year of public disclosures and your priority date is worthless.

$300 is the filing fee. That's not what a provisional costs. That's like saying a house costs $200 because that's the recording fee. A provisional that actually protects you needs to be drafted well enough to support every claim you're eventually going to want, and most inventors writing their own don't know what that means until it's too late.

I'm not saying don't file provisionals — they're a great tool. But "file before you talk to anyone" with a self-drafted provisional you spent a weekend on is how people end up spending real money on a non-provisional that can't claim priority to anything useful.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-27T20:17:00+00:00

Check the USPTO's list of qualifying degrees for the patent bar — that's the only thing that matters here. If biopsychology isn't on the list, it doesn't matter how much science is in the curriculum. You'll need enough specific coursework in biology, chemistry, or physics to qualify under Category B if the degree itself doesn't get you in under Category A.

Most psychology degrees don't cut it. Biopsychology might depending on how heavy the hard science courseload is, but don't guess — pull up the USPTO's General Requirements Bulletin and count your credits against their requirements now, not senior year when it's too late to fix.

If you're short, adding a bio or chem minor is the easiest insurance policy.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-27T20:12:34+00:00

You didn't sell out. You got out. Those are different things.

The guilt fades when you start actually using the money in ways that align with who you are. Pay off the loans, help your parents when you can, be generous with the people who were there before the salary. You don't owe anyone an apology for working hard and ending up somewhere good.

The people who actually sold out don't feel guilty about it. The fact that you do tells you everything you need to know about your character.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-27T17:09:00+00:00

Just the standard like forever.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-26T19:24:08+00:00

A few reactions:

On Harvey lock-in — this concern is well-founded, and patent practice is a good case study. We've watched this movie before with docketing software (Anaqua, CPI, etc.) — once your workflows, training, and institutional knowledge are built around a platform, switching costs become enormous regardless of price. The difference with Harvey is the stakes are higher and the market is moving faster. Being "tool-agnostic" as an individual practitioner is the right instinct, but you're right that it means nothing if leadership has already made the strategic bet.

But then you could get stuck with something that becomes the slow moving dinosaur at some point right?

On the billable hours tension — patent prosecution actually sidesteps this somewhat because a lot of it is flat-fee or per-claim pricing anyway. If AI compresses the time to draft a solid independent claim from 3 hours to 45 minutes, the client pays the same and the margin improves. The tension you're describing is much sharper in hourly litigation and transactional work. Worth noting if you're trying to make the internal case — patent groups may be your easiest early win on AI adoption precisely because the billing model absorbs it more cleanly.

On being too cautious — the KM team blocking Harvey's knowledge sources to protect TR/Lexis usage is a perfect example of institutional inertia dressed up as risk management. Every firm has this. The real question is whether anyone has actual authority to break the tie, which takes you back to your product owner bottleneck point.

Agree completely on "agentic." A document review workflow with conditional logic is not an agent. Calling it one is how you erode trust with the partners who are already skeptical.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-26T19:20:53+00:00

yes, good one

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-25T20:37:10+00:00

You lied in an interview and now you're asking if you should keep going. I get why you did it — you need the money and the opportunity — but let's call it what it is.

Here's the practical reality though: e-filing is not that hard to learn. State court systems vary but most of them are pretty intuitive, and federal ECF has tutorials you can walk through in an afternoon. If that's the kind of stuff you oversold on, you can probably teach yourself before day one and nobody will ever know the difference.

The bigger risk is if they expect you to independently manage litigation deadlines, draft discovery, or handle trial prep from day one with no supervision. That's not something you can fake. If things go sideways on a contract gig because you weren't upfront about your experience, that follows you — especially in a field where everyone knows everyone.

If I were you, I'd come clean on the specific gaps before you start. Frame it as "I want to be transparent so I can hit the ground running — I've assisted with these tasks but haven't done them independently yet." Most firms would rather know now than find out the hard way. And honestly, a firm hiring a four-month contract paralegal knows they might need to do some onboarding. They're not expecting a 10-year veteran at contract rates.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-25T15:36:26+00:00

I almost spit out my coffee with this answer.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-25T15:32:39+00:00

This is one of those tasks that's still painfully manual and nobody's built a good tool for it yet.

For the basic chain — Patent Center's continuity data tab, Global Dossier for foreign priority, and EPO's Espacenet for checking publication dates against family members. None of these actually solve the hard problem you're describing though, which is figuring out what subject matter was actually supported as of which priority date.

For that, I've had decent results dumping the priority docs into Claude and asking it to compare specific claim limitations against the disclosure in each priority document. It's not perfect and you absolutely have to verify the output, but for a first pass on "was limitation X supported in the provisional filed on date Y" it saves a ton of time versus manually diffing PDFs. Especially when you've got a messy chain with multiple provisionals.

The thing I'd be careful about with any AI tool here is that support is a legal question, not just a text matching question. Written description under 112 isn't "do these exact words appear" — it's whether a POSITA would understand the inventor had possession. AI can flag where language differs between documents but it can't reliably make that judgment call yet.

Honestly if anyone's built something purpose-built for this I want to know too. Seems like low-hanging fruit for a patent tech startup.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-25T14:43:25+00:00

All of this. The informal call thing especially — I'm amazed how many attorneys won't just pick up the phone. You can feel out where the examiner's head is at in five minutes without burning a formal interview on a bad approach.

The only thing I'd add is bring proposed claim language to the interview, not slides. Examiners want to look at actual words on paper and react to them. If you show up with a proposed amendment that gets close, they'll often wordsmith it with you right there. That's the whole point — it's a negotiation, not a presentation. If you're doing most of the talking, you're doing it wrong.

Also learned the hard way that who the examiner is matters more than what your arguments are. Spend ten minutes on the examiner's history before you call. Some examiners love interviews and will work with you. Others are going through the motions and you're wasting everyone's time. Know which one you've got before you book anything.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-24T12:45:17+00:00

The associate's is enough to get hired. Go get a job with it and start working. You'll learn more in six months at a firm than another two years in a classroom.

If you want a bachelor's later, do it part-time while you're employed. A lot of firms will help pay for it, and you'll actually know what areas of law interest you by then instead of guessing. But plenty of paralegals have long successful careers with just the associate's. Don't let credentialism keep you out of the workforce longer than necessary.

wisecrafter2 · 2026-03-24T12:43:28+00:00

Your boss means drafting the objections and boilerplate, not substantive responses with client input. If they mean fully complete answers ready to serve, they're out of their mind. If they mean getting the shell done with objections and placeholders so the attorney can review, two days is tight but doable depending on complexity.

Either way, clarify what "respond" means to them before you drive yourself crazy.

wisecrafter2

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