Peer to Peer Magazine

48 R emote working is increasingly common for lawyers. With clients who expect responsiveness 24x7 — and lawyers who expect to be able to get work done on the go wherever they may be — the legal profession has evolved to accommodate more flexible, mobile and agile working practices. Now the time has come to extend remote working options more systematically to law firm staff, particularly in IP prosecution practices. The clear business benefits of doing so — from better productivity to happier employees — point to a future in which firms that do not offer remote working options to staff members will find it challenging to keep up with those that do. IP prosecution is a fast-paced, deadline- driven practice area where mistakes can be extremely costly for both the client and the law firm. At the same time, there is tremendous pressure on profitability. Successful IP prosecution relies on the timely creation, processing, submission and retrieval of a large volume of documents and correspondence. Firms that allow both lawyers and staff to work remotely are generally better positioned to respond more quickly to client requests, to foreign associates and to the USPTO — and to do so more efficiently. In this article, I will share my own personal experience in promoting remote working as a director at one of the largest full-service intellectual property practices in the US. I'll then review the business benefits of remote working in IP prosecution practices and outline key considerations in making remote working successful. Changing perceptions of remote working When I first joined the law firm as Director of Intellectual Property Services in 2007, the firm was already well known as one of the top patent law firms in the US. Given the high volume of patents our team was processing and our ambition to do more faster and more efficiently, I proposed remote working to the management committee, but didn't get very far. The perception was that remote working was too much of a question mark — there would be no way to accurately assess a person's productivity and performance Remote Working in IP Prosecution Practices B Y B R I A N A I T C H I S O N Fast forward to 2015, and firm management was exploring new ways to optimize and reduce operational costs. I was presented with the opportunity to make the business case for remote working. Could I actually convince firm management that it was a strategically sound move? Measuring productivity I knew that lawyers in general appreciate hard facts and data, and that firm management still needed to be convinced that remote working was desirable or even necessary. Fortunately, I already had several years' worth of metrics to establish a baseline of productivity, which could serve as a baseline to assess the impact of remote working practices. Already in my first five years at the firm, we had improved productivity in terms of patent applications filed per person per week by more than 200%. The performance improvements were due to improved training and software tools, as part of a broader effort to improve workflow efficiency across the firm. Now the question became: What would happen to productivity and quality if IP prosecution staff were allowed to work from home? The Case for Change E X P E R T P E R S P E C T I V E

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