Searching for the In-House IP Attorney Career Path

"There’s almost no way to win for general counsel when it comes to assuring the members of their department satisfying career paths at the pace they desire," writes Rees Morrison at Law Department Management. "Developmental initiatives mentioned by respondents to a recent law department survey, in Legal Week, Sept. 28, 2006 at 10, included 'establishing a career development review process for high-achieving lawyers, introducing new areas of legal expertise and rotating lawyers around the department.'"

Those comments have become much more salient now that I have now found myself assigned to a corporate team that has been delegated with

• Identifying ways to enrich the careers for IP professionals within the company, and
• Establishing career pathways within the company's IP framework.

While the process and deliverables for acheiving these formidable goals are still not entirely well-defined, at this point, our all-attorney team seems likely to be focusssing its efforts on identifying

• Skill set definitions
• Training opportunities
• Bubble opportunities
• Advancement paths
• Compensation/Rewards & Recognition
• Titling

I would therefore greatly appreciate any information and/or insights that readers can offer about other organizations' experiences on searching for the elusive "in-house IP attorney career path." And, in the meantime, I also wanted to pass along a few links to some of Morrison's other "talent management" ideas for enriching law department careers, including

• on-the-spot awards for superior performance,
• mentoring program that cuts across organizational boundaries,
• more turns on the job-rotation dance floor,
• formal career development plans,
• published promotion criteria,
• better job descriptions,
• tuition reimbursement,
• temporary assignments of senior lawyers,
• executive development courses,
• stints on the business side,
• a human resources representative for the law department, and
• hierarchical titles