Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ruined_My_Life]

I am am a first year evening law student.  I work full time in a law firm.

I am miserable.  My billable hour requirement is way too much for me.  It may just be that I'm not that efficient.  I only get 30 hours per application and I usually end up spending at least 40.  I only get 5.5 hours per response and I usually spend at least 6.5-7.  On top of all that, there are all kinds of non-billabe things that seem to eat up my day (dealing with staff, forwarding notices of allowance, checking IDSs and other paperwork). 

I can probably make my hours this year, but it's killing me.  I hate it.  Moreover, I'm not even thinking about law school.  My grades so far have been fine, but they are about to take a nose dive. 

My marriage is on the skids and I haven't seen my two year old daughter much since August. 

It seems to me that I've made a pretty big mistake.  Does this ever get any better?  I liked being a patent agent before I got to law school, but three more years of this will kill me, my marriage or both.  Is this worth it?  Did any of you get through this with a family? 

[stuffball]

I did it with a family, but only barely.  It sucked.  A lot.  Four years of sucking.  I'm not 100% sure I'd say it's worth it, frankly.  Depends on what your other options are.

What's your billable requirement anyway?

[petethebody]

As a recent law grad, magna cum laude, from a T20, who is unemployed.  It is not worth the money, much less the time.  You have no upward potential above what you have now, especially with the pressures to keep prosecution billing low.

If you are going to law school to make more money, that ship has sailed.  Don't fuck up your family for law school.  That's just stupid.  The actual practice of law is definitely fun, but way more work for far less reward than you were promised.  

You're not seeing your kid because of law school?  Get your priorities straight.

[klaviernista]

Hey there.  

I can sympathize with your situation because I went through the same thing.  School gets somewhat better after first year.  It will still suck up a lot of your life, but not as much as first year.  The main problem with first year is that you have no idea what you are doing or how much to study.  Thus, like most risk averse lawyers, you overstudy.  That will change with time.

As to working as a patent attorney . . . the hours really don't get better.  If you are 80% efficient as a prosecution attorney, you are doing pretty well billing your time.  I'm not sure what your firm policy is like, but when I was a first (and second) year, the partners in charge of my clients told me to bill 100% of the time I spent doing anything for a client.  They would work out how much the client was actually billed.  It wasn't until I was a third or fourth year that I was expected to limit my billable hours for particular actions.  Also, it would seem that at least some of the stuff you consider non-billable (e.g., checking IDS' and other paperwork) is actually billable.  You are providing a value added service to the client.  Whether that time gets passed on to the client is the responsibility of the partner.  You shouldn;t cheat yourself out of 1-1.5 billables a day because you feel altruistic.

Regarding your marriage, that is a tough one.  Working full time and going to school at night sucks up a lot of time.  Your wife needs to understand that you are trying to provide a better life for everyone in your family, and that the ridiculous hours will eventually end.  But you also have to understand that your wife and kid need you around.  My suggestion is that you schedule 1 day a week, preferably a weekend, where you spend the entire day with your family and do nothing else.  I did this, and it was the single best thing I did for my marriage while in law school.  If your grades slip a little, so what?  Who gives a rats patoot if you graduate cum laude if you are divorced and are paying child support?  I doubt many people would consider that "succeeding" in law school, and any human attorney you work with should understand.  And if you work for someone who doesn't understand, run very very very fast in the other direction.

Best of luck to you.  Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss in a less public manner or just bounce some ideas off me.  Happy to help in whatever way I can.

[Ruined_My_Life]

Thanks for your responses.

My priorities are straight.  I love my family more than anything and they are the only reason I am doing this.  Admittedly, I am in over my head but I have never lost sight of my priorities.

Also, thanks for the encouragement.  I really appreciate it.  I hope things get better.

My billing requirement is only 1650 which is a fully 150 hours less than it was when I was a patent agent.  I thought it would be no problem, after all... 150 hours is around what I usually bill in a month.  I was wrong.  It's a big problem for me especially since I know I will get fired if my efficiency is too low.

[virus_guy]

RML,

Reading your post was like reading about myself. I too am a first year evening law student and I also work full time in a law firm. I'm a scientific advisor, but also a registered patent agent, and my billable requirement is also 1650. If you say you work in NYC, then that would just be creepy.

Anyways, I'm also quite miserable with trying to balance my time between work, school, and family, and trying to maintain a decent level of quality in my work duties as well as in my school work without having to dip into family time. I've been doing what mr. klaviernista suggested, taking a weekend day (saturday) and dedicate that time to family, but when sunday rolls around I'm completely overwhelmed by the reading I need to do for the rest of the week (since i'm completely exhausted when I get home from school on the weekdays). So, I feel your pain. I too constantly think about whether or not I can stick it out for three more years.

Many people I've talked to, who are more senior than me in the evening part-time law school adventure, generally say that it gets easier, which I think is true. I think posters on this forum also say the same thing. But, personally, the fact is that I need to carry the same amount of credits next year, i.e. time in class, as I did this year and subsequent years. Factoring in commuting time, which may or may not be an issue for you, I think I'm just spending too much time on this law school stuff.

I don't know what sort of advice I can provide, but I just wanted to commiserate and also thank the above posters for the pertinent advice. I'm actually on the fence about whether to quit school or not, but i also feel that if I do, i might as well think about finding a different career. Feel free to pm for further commisseration 

[ME]

Are you dictating? This could make you much more efficient, and might make your billable hours closer to what you actually work. I do about 5 to 10 pages of text an hour when I dictate. The time I bill for drafting an application is very close to how long it actually takes me. (Office actions are sometimes a different matter though.)

We use an external typist and just email her the audio file. One attorney uses Dragon Naturally Speaking. I have not tried it, but it seems to work well for him.

Cheers

[JazzyJ]

I think everyone has felt like you at one point.  I was a tech spec going to school and working full time in a firm just like you.  I remember when I first started, I was so concerned with my work product that I would spend hours on the most minor thing, I was also concerned with my efficiency so I would cut my time.  There were days that I would be in the office from 8am to 12am just to get an 8 hour billing day. 

The first year of law school was a struggle but I promise you it will get better.  After the first year of law school I had bit more flexibility with my schedule and was able to choose a few of my classes and which days I had class.  After the second year of law school I had complete say over my schedule and I only went to school 2 days of the week in the 3rd and 4th years of my part time night program. 

I suggest that you stick in there.... after some experience, writing a response to an office action will become automatic and you'll see that averaging 5hrs/response is not so bad.  Same with the applications.  It just takes time but eventually you will be in the office for 8 hours and you will have 8 hours billed.  Also, I disagree with the previous comment... working full time with an increased billing rate is MUCH easier than doing the decreased billing rate AND going to law school (I remember having to spend my vacation time studying for exams - awful).  What you are going through right now is the worst of it, trust me.  Hang in there and good luck!!

[DogDayPM 9er9er9er]

My 2 cents for R_M_L and The Virus:  It does get easier after the 1L stuff is out of the way.  I went full time and worked "part time" and my 2 older daughters were born during (respectively) 1L and 2L years.  Part time is in quotes because as anyone who's tried to work professionally as a part timer can tell you, you may get a part time salary but you quickly end up working essentially full time hours.

Like Klav mentioned, after you get this year under your belt you'll also get better at knowing how much you really need to read, whether you really need to brief cases or not (do they still do that?), etc.

On the marital front, what others have said can help.  How about you get up early with the family Sat. a.m. and dedicate the morning to them, and only start LS stuff after 1  or 2 p.m. Saturdays?  And any evening you're home, up to 10 p.m. is your wife's property and you only ever watch TV if that's what she wants you to do with her.  Then do reading after that.  And as JazzyJ said, future years give you the potential to set the schedule up with more evenings home.

At work, dictation is good advice if you can hack it (I can't think that way).  How much time are you spending typing frequently used phrases?  I use WORD's "autocorrect" file extensively for anything that I have to type repetitively in either an office action response or in a patent application.  "respectfully submits" - how many times do you type that during a lengthy response?  I only type "rss" each time (and use "rs" for "respectfully submit").  Similar for "respectfully requests" and "respectfully disagrees".  Applicant, Applicants are "Aa" and "Aas".  (so "Applicant respectfully submits" is "Aa rss".  "Person having ordinary skill of the art" is "osa".  "iot" and "iaw" for "in order to" and "in accordance with".  It takes a bit to set up but seems worth it after that.  All cited art I do a quick set up for also, so that "Klaviernista et al. `907" becomes "kk", etc.  When drafting a new app, any frequently used technical phrases get typed once as I'm writing then pasted into autocorrect.  I just make up a cheat sheet so I can remember all the shortcuts for that app.     

[bald & chained]

What DogDay said, plus a few extra tips for efficient drafting of OA responses:

1)  It helps to have a pre-drafted response template that is already divided into the standard sections, such as claim amendments, remarks, 101/102/103 rejections, conclusion, etc.  You may also want to include the legal statements (e.g., the standard for obviousness) that you frequently use in your responses.  Having a response template helps you organize your thoughts and ensures that you do not waste time “re-inventing the wheel” every time you sit down to write a response.

2) Many steps involved in writing an Office Action response involve a great deal of busywork.  For example, downloading the cited art, getting a clean set of claims from the previous response into the current response, figuring out the scope differences between claims sets, creating claim summary sections for the response, propagating claim amendments through all sets of claims, checking amendments for any errors, and so forth.  Depending on the complexity of the amendments, you can often spend most of your response budget even before you get to write the actual argument.  To cut down on the these time-consuming tasks, you can use a software program like ClaimMaster (www.patentclaimmaster.com), which automates some of the more tedious analysis/prosecution steps and also checks your responses for errors.

3) Dictation is great time saver.... if you can do it.  I tried Dragon's and it was too hard.

[Robert K S]

after some experience, writing a response to an office action will become automatic

This may hold true for a few types of Office actions, like very poorly written restriction requirements, but I can't see most types of responses ever becoming "automatic".  In most cases there are technical issues to be considered, or little labors to be tackled.  I would hope that for anyone who considered prosecution as a career, it would be precisely because it could never turn you into an automaton.

[Robert K S]

DogDayPM, your autocorrect advice is a little genius.  I have certain things on autocorrect (like (SS) turns into the section symbol) but hadn't thought of doing that for laboriously repeated short phrases.  Thanks for that.

[JazzyJ]

after some experience, writing a response to an office action will become automatic

This may hold true for a few types of Office actions, like very poorly written restriction requirements, but I can't see most types of responses ever becoming "automatic".  In most cases there are technical issues to be considered, or little labors to be tackled.  I would hope that for anyone who considered prosecution as a career, it would be precisely because it could never turn you into an automaton.

Picky picky!!  What I meant was after a few years of experience structuring an argument like 103, knowing which sections in the MPEP to cite, etc. SHOULD be automatic.  Obviously, technical issues will be different and every response will not be a cut and paste of the other. 

As any attorney knows there are multiple ways of interpreting written statements.... don't always assume the worse.  Loosen the tie a little Robert... the work day is almost over :-)

[DogDayPM 9er9er9er]

DogDayPM, your autocorrect advice is a little genius.  I have certain things on autocorrect (like (SS) turns into the section symbol) but hadn't thought of doing that for laboriously repeated short phrases.  Thanks for that.

They can be pretty long phrases, too, although I've never verified the character limit.  I had a 2 paragraph set of instructions that I emailed out to clients with draft agreement copies.  When it got to the point where I was sending out 10 agreements a week, it finally occurred to me that with WORD as my editor on Outlook, I could dump all the instructions into an autocorrect file, too.  It even kept the paragraph break and empty line between the paragraphs.

[bald & chained]

DogDayPM, your autocorrect advice is a little genius.  I have certain things on autocorrect (like (SS) turns into the section symbol) but hadn't thought of doing that for laboriously repeated short phrases.  Thanks for that.

They can be pretty long phrases, too, although I've never verified the character limit.  I had a 2 paragraph set of instructions that I emailed out to clients with draft agreement copies.  When it got to the point where I was sending out 10 agreements a week, it finally occurred to me that with WORD as my editor on Outlook, I could dump all the instructions into an autocorrect file, too.  It even kept the paragraph break and empty line between the paragraphs.

I've used this too - there is a 255 character limit, but that should be plenty for most statements.