In this blog post for Summer of IP 2026, Kadija Begum shares her experience of attending one of our employer events hosted by the IP Federation to learn all about an IP career in industry. She met a range of industry-based IP professionals and enjoyed the interactive round-table exercise involving considering an invention alongside what was already known in the field, and then drafting a novel patent claim.
Kadija writes:
I recently attended an IP Federation event as part of Summer of IP 2026, where I heard from a panel of professionals working across different areas of IP, including a patent attorney, trade mark solicitor, patent litigator and an in-house IP solicitor. Hearing how each of them found their way into IP, what their day-to-day work involves, and the different perspectives they brought to the field gave me a lot to think about.
The highlight of the day was a practical patent drafting session led by Chris Clarke. We were given an inflatable fish toy as our invention and asked to identify its patentable features and draft claims around them. From there, I worked through an opposition scenario where prior art showed a similar invention. The key distinguishing feature was that the weight controlling the movement of our client’s fish could be adjusted remotely, whereas the prior art relied on manual adjustment.
I was paired with Bobby Mukherjee and Julie Dunnett, who helped me work through the drafting task and gave me some genuinely useful tips along the way. What I found most interesting was having to think carefully about what made the invention different from the prior art, it felt like a game of spot the difference, but with much higher stakes.
It was the most engaging exercise of the day, and I left wanting to do more patent drafting. It was a good reminder of why I find IP so interesting: it combines technical understanding with precise thinking and problem solving in a way few other fields do.
Thank you to Alex Driver and the IP Federation for running such an engaging session, and to Careers in Ideas for sharing the opportunity to learn from such a varied group of IP professionals. I came away with some valuable advice, a better understanding of patent drafting, and even more enthusiasm for a career in IP.
Last Updated: September 23, 2026