Karl and Angela Rees

Karl passed the patent bar! Just a month or two and he'll be a Patent Agent. And now we're off to San Jose until August.Just because I think this information might be helpful to other law students thinking about taking for the patent bar exam, I thought I'd briefly relate my process of studying for the patent bar.

After my second year of law school, having taken three patent classes (but none dealing with claims drafting or prosecution), and having externed for about a month at a local IP firm (working on a provisional patent application in the process), I decided to give the exam a go.

Knowing nothing about how the exam works, I went to the USPTO's site on the registration process (which, if you ask me, is a bit cryptic), downloaded a form, and sent it off with the requisite fee ($240 total). This was back in March. They sent me a letter about a week later giving me an ID number and saying I could sign up with Thomson Prometric to take the test. So I went to their site and signed up online, again paying the requisite fee ($150), and signed up to take the test on May 31st. This would give me about a month to study after the end of finals.

I didn't want to spend a lot of money on patent review courses. Figuring that I could retake the test 2 or 3 times and still come out ahead money wise, I decided to go at it on my own. I simply downloaded all of the old tests available on the USPTO site, along with a copy of the MPEP and started studying.

Now, a lot of people say not to do this, and if you haven't had any classes dealing with patent law (particularly 35 USC 102-103), perhaps they're right. But I'm living proof now that you can pass the exam on the first try using this method.

I found it a little hard to tackle the MPEP at first--it's pretty dry and there's a lot of terminology you don't hear about in patent classes at law school. I probably spent 3 or 4 days just trying to familiarize myself with concepts and basic procedures. Don't read the MPEP straight-through like a book! I found it most useful at first to read through key sections of each chapter, skipping all the minor ones with the details.

After about a week I felt comfortable enough to tackle a test. I tried taking a test under test conditions--this is not particularly useful at first. I just felt very stupid in the end. I was very worried that I had made a mistake in not taking a review course.

Instead, I would suggest going through one test, slowly. Try to figure out the answer to a question, and take all the time you need to figure it out. Then read the answer to that question and review the sections the answer points you to. This is where you start learning about all the minor sections of the MPEP. As you do this, you should be figuring out how the MPEP is organized so you can find things quickly. It really helps if you can look at a question and immediately know which chapter and even subsection to look at first. There's no way you're going to know the answer to every question on test day--you're going to have to know how to search quickly and efficiently.

This is basically all I would do up until the last week (about 6-8 hours a day, with a few holidays). Then I started timing myself on each question, and spending closer to 10 hours a day studying. If I couldn't find the answer after 3 minutes, I would just give it my best guess. Then I would look up the answer and review any concepts that I was unfamiliar with. This is a great way to get ready to deal with the pressure of a timed test.

On test day I woke up a few hours before my test, had a good breakfast and just reviewed some of the practice tests. I was glad I did this--there were 10-20 questions on the exam that came directly from the practice tests, as well as a number of slightly modified questions. It pays to have these fresh on your mind (and gives you extra time to review other questions).

My morning session was a lot easier than my afternoon session, but that may have been because I hadn’t studied a lot of the material on the afternoon test very thoroughly. There was a heavy emphasis on the PCT, appeals, and for some odd reason, dead inventors. Perhaps it was just the luck of the draw. Eventually, I just decided to skip some of the harder PCT questions and come back to them at the end. So yes, I just guessed on 2 or 3 questions.

Overall, I’d say that the most important sections of the MPEP to study are 2100 and 700, followed closely by 600. I also found myself in 1200 (appeals), 400 (ownership/inventors), 300 (assignees), 1400 (reissues), 2200 (reexaminations), and a few other sections. It’s good to know the 37 CFR fairly well too, but of course that’s reproduced in the MPEP. I was surprised by the lack of questions about ethics.

As for my testing center, I took the exam in Lindon, Utah. The computer was actually pretty fast. I would have liked a larger monitor, but it was adequate—either 15 or 17 inches, I can’t remember. It was frustrating not to be able to see the MPEP and the test question on the screen side by side, but there’s not much you can do about that. The center was full as I took the test, but it was very quiet and thanks to my cubicle I hardly knew anyone was there. Ironically, it was actually upstairs from the company I worked before quitting to go to law school (Corda Technologies), so I caught up with former co-workers during the lunch break. It was good to have a break, because by the end of the sessions my brain was so tired that I wanted to quit before the test ended.

I got a sheet of paper at the end saying that “Preliminary test results show that you passed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Registration Examination” and that’s I’d receive my official examination results from the USPTO in due course. Hopefully the computer wasn’t lying about me passing. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.