Helping hands for P2 candidates

The IPKat today received a friendly message from Doug Ealey, a patent attorney at D Young & Co. Doug says:

"I thought IPKAT might be interested to learn that a new (and free) study guide [IPKat comment: cover pictured right, looking suspiciously professional] has been written specifically for patent students taking this year's P2 exam.

As you know, this year students face the unenviable task of trying to learn UK patent law by reference to the Black Book and the 5th cumulative supplement to the Black Book, whilst cross-referencing everything with all the new rules via the concordance. It was bad enough when it was just the Black Book!

In response I have written a study guide that collates all the changes to the sections and rules, and presents the resulting statute in a way that is intended to make learning the UK patents act (and elements from EPC, PCT, and US patent law) much simpler. It also includes a large number of legal and practice notes aimed at common issues that are raised in the Exam.

To quote from the foreword to the book: “'The Guide sets out to achieve the opposite of such books as Visser and Hoekstra; rather than provide exhaustive commentary on all patent law for reference during the open-book EQEs, it instead simplifies the law and commentary (including the recent rule changes) as far as possible, to provide a unified, bare-bones reference that can be readily learnt for the closed-book UK finals'.”

Having experienced for myself the joys of taking UK finals whilst the Black Book is in flux, I hope that this guide will make the task a bit easier this year; certainly, the feedback I've had on early drafts is that it's very useful!"

Doug has very generously made the full text of his book available on a dedicated blog, and promises that updates will be made in the following few months leading up to the examination itself.

Regular readers will know that this is just the sort of thing that the IPKat is wholeheartedly in favour of, and he hopes that Doug's efforts are useful in helping out would-be UK patent attorneys, who have an awful lot of learning and understanding to do over the next few months. He would also, however, like to point out that there is simply no substitute for working it all out for oneself, and the best way to stand a good chance of passing has to involve putting plenty of time in, using helping guides like these as an aid. Getting the right sort of experience at work helps too, but there is less we can actively do about that.

P2 candidates should also know that there other free sources of help out there include the Kat's favoured ukpatents wiki, which certainly assisted him in passing P2 in 2006, and has been updated with all the changes that have come along since then. There is now really no excuse not to get down to some serious work...