Big CIPA & Little CIPA

10 November 2014, 6 pm

At the end of the Professions Week reception I chat to the Informals Committee.  At long last we are bringing the Informals properly into the CIPA fold.  For too long they have had to cope on their own, and a fantastic job they have done too, but it is time we made a little more effort to support them.

We have got it all sorted.  There will be a Big CIPA and a Little CIPA.  Big CIPA will look after Little CIPA and pay it pocket money to buy drinks and crisps.  But Little CIPA will still be free to make its own money to supplement the Big CIPA pocket money, for instance by selling claim amendments at car boot sales.  (This is a joke, by the way.)  Also Little CIPA will have its own bank account, although Big CIPA will watch it like a hawk for signs of money laundering, excessive profitability or the squandering of funds on undignified things like pork scratchings.

In other respects, the Big CIPA/Little CIPA relationship will follow the standard patent attorney training model.  Big CIPA will look after Little CIPA most solicitously until the point when it becomes clear that Little CIPA knows more about what’s going on than Big CIPA does (this is likely to be in around three weeks, at current rates), or until Big CIPA gets bored of being solicitous.  At that point, Little CIPA will be allowed to go off and do entirely its own thing, so long as it reports back to Big CIPA every few months to confirm that its own thing is going well.  And Big CIPA will sit back smugly and say: “Look how well our Little CIPA is doing!  Doesn’t it make you proud?” and pass it all the rubbish jobs to do because rubbish jobs are good training.  But if Little CIPA cocks anything up, Big CIPA will be Very Busy that day, because getting yourself out of a cock-up on your own is particularly good training. 

Not that I am anticipating any cock-ups.  The Informals of 2014 are ruthlessly efficient.  I just know that on the issues we’ve discussed this evening, they will have emailed me a draft document before I’ve even emerged from the underground at Paddington.