Patent Attorney

Arm is a complex and dynamic semiconductor and AI technology business with a portfolio of over 12,000 active patents and applications covering a broad range of CPU, GPU, AI, semiconductor and software technologies. This is an exciting time to join and help shape how innovation is protected within our business.

Our in-house IP team builds and curates Arm’s global patent portfolio and supports the protection of innovation throughout our business. As Arm continues to invest in IP protection across both established and emerging technology areas, we are expanding our Patents team to add drafting and prosecution capability.

This is a new type of role for Arm. While our existing patent attorneys are involved across the breadth of portfolio development and management, this position is being created with hands-on patent drafting and prosecution as a primary activity, helping to build our in-house capability.

The role is particularly suited to a patent attorney who genuinely enjoys the craft of drafting and prosecution and wants that to remain a significant part of their day-to-day work. You will have the opportunity to work on technically challenging inventions at the leading edge of Arm’s business without needing to move away from hands-on patent work to develop your in-house career.

You will work directly with inventors and engineering teams across Arm to understand new technologies, help identify and capture inventions, and draft patent applications covering innovations in areas including microelectronics, semiconductor technology, computer architecture, software and artificial intelligence. You will also take direct responsibility for the prosecution of your filings before the UKIPO, EPO and other patent offices, while continuing to work alongside and direct our network of external patent counsel where appropriate.

Because this is a new capability for Arm, you could help shape it from the outset. Rather than joining a mature process and simply working through an established caseload, you will be the start of an effective in-house drafting and prosecution function, develop prosecution workflows, explore how we better engage with inventors for our own drafts, and help to develop our use of AI to work more effectively.

We are not looking simply to recreate an external patent attorney firm within Arm. We want to develop an in-house model that takes advantage of being embedded within the business, with closer access to inventors, greater insight into our technologies and strategy, and the ability to make prosecution decisions in the context of the wider portfolio and Arm’s commercial objectives.

For someone coming from private practice, this offers a relatively unusual proposition: the opportunity to continue doing the drafting and prosecution work you enjoy, while helping to kickstart a new in-house capability around it. There are no client billing requirements, billable-hour targets or pressure to generate work, but there will be expectations set around drafting and prosecution output which are intended to ensure an appropriate and sustainable level of delivery and to demonstrate the value of this role, rather than recreate a private-practice billing environment.

Being embedded within Arm also means having much greater context around the inventions you protect. You will build relationships with inventors and technical teams, understand the technologies and products being developed, and see how individual inventions fit within Arm’s wider technology, commercial and patent strategies. The objective is not simply to draft and prosecution file on any idea, but to help identify, capture and prepare cases to build a strategically relevant portfolio for the business.

Although…