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Corporate Legal Counsel

General Counsel
Deputy General Counsel
Chief Compliance Officer / Chief Governance Officer
Associate General Counsel
Assistant General Counsel
VP or Senior Counsel for Intellectual Property
Patent Counsel

About Job Titles and the hierarchy within corporate structures and in the respective IT Departments.
Each company will call the various IT positions by other names since each company’s structure will be different from one another. This will partially depend on the size of each company, the job descriptions and who the IT professionals work for and under.

VP or Senior Counsel for Intellectual Property

When outside IP lawyers are needed by companies to supplement the work of their in-house IP and general counsel, it is usually either for advice or assistance, and/or preparatory to, litigation and/or negotiations. Such a need usually arises because of the difficulty or importance of problems which are not appropriate for handling in-house, or because of a company policy to have certain work, such as litigation, handled by outside lawyers. One of the chief IP counsel’s initial tasks should be to recruit an appropriate number of individuals to staff the company’s IP department. VP or Senior must have a juris doctorate (JD) and should have 10 + years of relevant experience, technical background and registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Highly skilled attorneys are in demand and employment opportunities should remain strong for the coming year. Salary increases have been on average about 5.9% for IP counsel. Attorneys who have five-plus years of experience and patent trial and prosecution experience are sought by intellectual property firms and corporate legal departments especially in the information technology arena. Attorneys in this area of law can expect to receive salaries from a range between $200,000 and $285,000. Yet, the longer these IP attorneys are with a company providing excellent guidance resulting in corporate growth, bigger raises will continue to be given out along with incentive bonuses that can substantially increase the compensation package.

Some responsibilities for the VP or Senior Counsel for Intellectual Property include:

Plan, coordinate, and direct the overall IP program of the company, including policies, practices and procedures
Screen inventions with help of other departments and render opinions as to the patentability of new products and processes
Serve as a point of contact for outside inventors and counsel
Establish procedures concerning employee agreements relating to the disclosure and ownership of inventions
Arrange for the exchange of information between the company’s domestic and foreign in-house IP operations
Maintain contact with the company’s general counsel
Participate with company’s accountants in the administration of royalty payments