In this blog post for Summer of IP 2026, Kadija Begum shares her experience attending one of our Introductory Events in London, where she heard from two panels of speakers holding various positions in the Patents and Trade Marks professions.
Kadija writes:
As part of my Summer of IP, I attended the ‘Meet the IP Professionals’ panel discussion and networking event at Kilburn & Strode on Tuesday 7th July 2026, where I got to hear directly from people working across the intellectual property (IP) profession in a varied and honest evening of talks.
The event opened with a panel of trademark attorneys, patent examiners, and paralegals, followed by a Q&A session, and then a short networking break where I could speak to people one to one. The second panel was where things got especially interesting for me, as the speakers included a trainee patent attorney, an IP solicitor, a self-employed IP barrister, a patent attorney working in-house at GSK, and a patent attorney and IP counsel at dsm-firmenich.
Having five people at such different stages made it easy to compare their experiences side by side. Hearing the trainee describe her first year sitting right alongside someone who has built a career as a self-employed barrister (having previously trained and worked as a patent attorney), and someone else working in-house at a large pharmaceutical company, showed me just how many different shapes a career in IP can take, even for people who all trained as patent attorneys to begin with.
Networking afterwards was particularly useful. The patent attorney from dsm-firmenich, Tommy, gave practical advice about preparing for applications and interviews, including pointing me towards the European Patent Office’s own guidelines for getting to grips with patentability, and Espacenet as a free way to read real patent claims rather than just descriptions of them. Small, insider tips like these are hard to find just from researching online, and it made a real difference having the chance to ask someone doing the job directly.
I also hadn’t previously realised that IP work happens outside of firms and in-house teams too, and hearing from the self-employed barrister opened a route into the profession I hadn’t considered before.
Thank you to everyone at Kilburn & Strode for organising such a varied evening, and to the panellists, for being so generous with their time and advice.
Last Updated: July 28, 2026