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If You Look For a Wide Range of Human Resources

RC Taro Hirayama

Aiming to attract a wide range of talents for the new bar exam, law schools have been created and provide courses of study for those who hold an undergraduate degree in different fields other than law. So the law schools accept students with various backgrounds like working professionals or talents with science majors. However, in the first results of the bar exam announced this year, the pass rate was only 30 percent which was lower than expected. People have already started saying that it does not pay to take up a new life as legal professionals from different fields.

Five years before the new bar exam, the system of the Japan patent attorney examination had been reformed to seek for a wide range of talents. The number of applicants and the number of those who passed have been drastically increasing probably because of the reform. But many problems have been also occurring in accordance with the reform.

The biggest factor in the increase of applicants would be having eased restrictions on the exam system.

Like the old bar exam, the patent attorney exam has two parts: written and oral examinations. The written examination is divided into the computer-scored multiple-choice exam part and the essay exam part. Applicants must pass three exams within a year.

The multiple-choice exam takes the questions about four Industrial Property Right laws such as Patent law, Utility model law, Design law, and Trademark law and the related treaties as well as Unfair competition law and Copyright law. The essay exam has a required subject test about the four IPR laws at first and then, it has an elective subject test out of seven subjects such as general law or science subjects. In the oral exam, questions are asked only from the four IPR laws just as the required subject in the essay exam.

The patent attorney exam has allowed the applicants who passed the essay exam to exempt from taking the written exam for the next year only, and it introduced a new exemption system from elective subjects in the essay exam of 2002 for applicants with a certain qualification. At the same time, the subjects were reorganized to be the current seven subjects such as "geo-engineering", "machine engineering", "geophysical engineering", "information and telecommunication engineering", "applied science", "biotechnology", and "laws related to patent attorney's duties". In addition, "common problems" and "elective problems" were added to each subject.

This change caused a sense of unfairness among applicants because both exempt and non- exempt must take the essay exam, as the same load, at the same time. So a period of three weeks was set between elective subject exam and required subject exam to reduce unfairness. (Initially, the elective subject exam was on the following day of the required subject exam.) Also, a new system will be introduced next year to exempt the applicants from taking the elective subject exam indefinitely once they passed the elective subject exam.

The reason why such a sense of unfairness was caused was the qualification for the exemption.

To be exempted, applicants must be recognized to have the same level of standard as law or science subjects tested in the exam. From this viewpoint, applicants with such licenses are included: professional engineers, licensed electricians, first-class architects, pharmacists, and some IT engineers in the science field, and judicial or administrative scriveners in the legal field. Furthermore, through preliminary review it is also recognized for those who hold master degree or more.

On the other hands, there is a criticism whether these licenses ensure license holders to have the same level of the exam subjects qualified. For example, there seem to be a lot of complaints from the engineers, who did not go to graduate school but started working in research and development at corporations. In fact, there have been many cases where, in order to be exempted, some people tried to obtain a license for an administrative scrivener or IT engineer, which is obviously outside of their original specialty.

I am enrolled in the graduate school of law department now. And my concern is the range of exemption in the case of a graduate student. In this case, the students need to conduct researches consistent with "elective problems" (Article 4-1, Enforcement Regulation of Patent Attorneys Law) instead of researches of elective "subjects". Therefore, for the exemption of "laws related to patent attorney's duties", master thesis must specialize in one of the elective problems such as "Civil procedure law", "Copyright law", "Act on Prohibition of Private Monopolization and Maintenance of Fair Trade", "Administrative law", or "Private international law". The exemption is not admitted if the thesis is not about the subject that does not exist in the elective problems such as "Public administration" or "Trademark law"

In addition, the exemption is not admitted if a student studies "Civil law" which is one of "common problems" in the elective subject test, as it should be "elective problems".

This must be quite natural in the case of other science subjects. For example, in the case of "physical engineering", the common problem is "physics", which is a basic subject while the elective is applied subjects such as "energy engineering" or "electromagnetics". They are so-to-say in vertical, the derivative in the relationship.

However, in the case of law subjects, although some laws are categorized as special laws toward Civil law as a general law, their relationship may be horizontal, and researchers in Civil law exist apart from researchers of Civil procedure law or Private international law.

Civil law is supposed to be known as a foundation of all private laws, however, I wonder it might disregard the actual realities overly that Researchers of Civil law are not exempt.
It seems quite strange that they do not demand people specialized in tort law or law of obligations for a patent attorney, who is an IP expert.