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With the registration deadline looming, I have some questions and thoughts I'm hoping others can respond to. There hasn't been much discussion about the SFIPLA here.

What are your thoughts on bidding on employers who dinged you at other fairs, specifically the Loyola PLIP?

Do people actually get hired through this fair? What are your chances compared to your school's OCI? Compared to Loyola? Compared to other career fairs? I was looking at the numbers for the BADCF (716 applications, 203 interviews, 68 callbacks, 22 offers), and those are not at all encouraging. I suspect SFIPLA and BADCF may be comparable in this regard.

What are your general thoughts on the firms that recruit at SFIPLA? There are a lot of firms that I would've expected on that list but that aren't attending. Only five of the twelve firms even show up on the Chambers and Partners IP CA list.

What about general hiring criteria? The firms mostly list very open-ended criteria like "strong academic credentials," which are totally unhelpful. Some of these firms don't recruit at our school's OCI, so I have no good idea of what they might want from a student at my school.

Would you go to this over your own school's OCI? Our OCI starts the following day. I likely won't have to miss it, but the evening drive down to SoCal after SFIPLA likely won't help me interview well.

Last, when are the interview schedules released? I can't find that info anywhere. I just know that employers are supposed to pick candidates by July 14.

Come on. No one has an opinion?

I'm sure lots of people have opinions... but I don't think very many have informed opinions.

I, for instance, had to google "SFIPLA" in order to figure out that it is the San Francisco Intellectual Property Law Association.

Hopefully someone will be able to post with some useful information. I can't do that.

However, you are saying that you have a 2.5% chance of getting an offer? That is almost as bad as trying to get an offer with big3 consulting.

Do you have an engineering degree or other IP angle? Because those odds look staggeringly bad. What has your career services office said about it?

What are the odds of getting an offer from your campus OCI? Are the jobs comparable?

IP firms in California are suffering like everyone else. I had several friends get no offered last summer at California IP practices.

Anecdotally, I haven't heard great things about it. And, personally, looking at what's being offered at SFIPLA makes me worried and nauseous. Still, if you are in SoCal and not at UCLA, USC, or UCI, and you have killer grades + an awesome resume then maybe you should still do it since you'll probably need all the help you can to at least make sure you're looked at for a possible interview, if your alternative is just mailing.

This is at best a semi-informed opinion -- going just based on the feeling I get talking to people around here, it's going to be a shitshow, since even IP-bound engineering kids are really worried about getting jobs right now, and very good kids from very good schools (i.e. Berkeley, T14 in the area doing 1L internships) are worried enough to be taking advantage of stuff like SFIPLA they may have blown off otherwise. (On the upside, at least you're not a rising 3L; I might be wrong but I think they have a grand total of 2 firms they can go for. Awesome.)

Voyager wrote:I'm sure lots of people have opinions... but I don't think very many have informed opinions.

Heh, I'll take uninformed over nothing. If anything, it helps just to discuss it.

Voyager wrote:Do you have an engineering degree or other IP angle? Because those odds look staggeringly bad. What has your career services office said about it?
What are the odds of getting an offer from your campus OCI? Are the jobs comparable?

IP firms in California are suffering like everyone else. I had several friends get no offered last summer at California IP practices.

In a good economy, I wouldn't worry at all. I probably wouldn't even go to this. I don't want to say too much about myself, but I should have excellent qualifications for someone interested in patent litigation.

But statistically, it just seems terrible. For more comparison, BADCF had 36 employers. SFIPLA has 11 down from 20 in 2008. If 22 people got job offers from BADCF, I wouldn't be surprised if maybe 6 or 7 got jobs out of SFIPLA with an applicant pool that's just as large. I also know people with great backgrounds who worked at top CA IP firms last summer, got no offered, and are now graduating jobless.

Anonymous User wrote:And, personally, looking at what's being offered at SFIPLA makes me worried and nauseous.

Ditto. "Shitshow" is right.

Probably not 22 people with offers, more likely the 8 strongest with about 3 offers each.

Hitachi wrote:Probably not 22 people with offers, more likely the 8 strongest with about 3 offers each.

That's a good point. So like 2-3 people might get job offers out of this fair. Greeeaaaat.