Q: Mr. Sherkow would you please provide a definition/explanation of your role as a Patent Law Professor:
I teach Patent Law and several related courses at the University of Illinois. I also research and write about patent law, mainly in the life sciences area. I'm currently working on a larger project about the CRISPR patent dispute, the gene-editing technology behind the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.
Q: Would you please provide your personal history achieving this role? Jacob, what is your story?
My story is pretty idiosyncratic. In an Honors Biology course in high school, my teacher, Mr. Eric Sloate, had us read Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), the famous case about patenting living organisms. I remember exactly where I was when I read it and thinking to myself, "Whatever this is, this is what I want to do." I was 16. After graduating from college and an abbreviated graduate program in biology, I went to law school with an undiminished zeal for patent practice. I joined a large law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, in New York, litigating patent cases. I was perfectly happy and would have stayed as long as they would have kept me, but in 2012, I applied—and to my astonishment, received—a Fellowship at Stanford Law School at the Center for Law and the Biosciences. I got a few lucky breaks as an academic after that and have now found myself teaching Patent Law—including the Chakrabarty case—dozens of years after I decided as a teenager that that's what I wanted to do. It's a dream come true, with the concession that my career ambitions in High School were quite different from my peers' slate of rock stars, actors, and playboy billionaires.
Q: Where are you based, what is your geographic location?
Champaign, Illinois.
Q: What would you say is the ease of entry into your current role?
Getting into the legal academy is difficult—I marvel that I was able to secure a job—but it is getting somewhat easier. Top-flight paper credentials are a must (with the caveat that the definition of "top flight" has, thankfully, become more inclusive), along with some demonstrated expertise—whether in scholarship or practice—in a particular field. Beyond walking the walk, one also needs to talk the talk: to show that one is invested in producing scholarship—read: writing law review articles—of good quality and well-published. Candidates also need to show, in their presentations, that they can make half-way decent instructors, usually not a major impediment for a field that values oral advocacy. Aside from those requirements, one needs some serious geographic flexibility. The hiring cycle is annual, and there's little guarantee that there will be an opening in a particular field, in a particular region, in any given year.
Q: How long have you served in this role?
I've been a legal academic since 2012, and a professor since 2014. I've been at Illinois since 2020.
Q: What would you say is the difficulty of the workload on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being easiest and 10 being most difficult)?
It's hard to judge; much of what makes academia difficult—or, better put, more difficult than it needs to be—is often a self-inflicted wound. The hours are fairly average, somewhere between 40–50 hours per week, although one could certainly work much more and, perhaps, slightly less. The work tends to be interesting, if complex, although one could just as well try to tackle the biggest problems of the day or much more low-hanging fruit. And, while faculty politics abound, client politics do not. I'd put this all at a 4 out of 10, although I'm sure there are many excellent academics who take things to the 7 and 8 range.
Q. Are there any additional licenses or certifications required?
Nope. Just a law degree or, in some special cases, a PhD in a law-adjacent field.
Q: Would you share with us what the pay scale is compared to that of other legal roles? Choose one of the following or add your own: pro-bono, almost pro-bono, modest, robust, exceptional?
Modest. The median pay for lawyers, in 2023, was $145,000, with a significant right tail (the mean is more than 10% higher). That's roughly the center of gravity for law professors across the U.S. as a whole. With that said, lawyers with the credentials to become academics often compare themselves to classmates in private practice at large law firms—many a law professor's job before moving to academia—who typically make many multiples of a professor's salary. You do it because you love it—the subject matter, one hopes, but also the blessed flexibility afforded for an academic's schedule.
Q: Do you find competitiveness is a factor in this role?
It can be competitive! There are always chairs to be filled, awards to be granted, prizes to be won, accolades to be bestowed—and that's not even including more practical things like moving up in the law school rankings or pay. Socially, too, there's a pecking order—more pronounced in some fields than others—often based on the strength of a professor's work.
Q: How would you describe your overall career satisfaction in this role?
Maximum satisfaction. I love it. As I noted earlier, I have what's been my dream job since I got my first driver's license. But aside from idiosyncratic taste, some of my satisfaction is personality driven and some a product of sheer luck. I'm generally pretty curious about most things and love writing, so having a job that affords me the space to endlessly feed my curiosity and then rewards me when I pique others' is a perfect fit. But some of that is, also, a product of my particular field—biotech patent law—that has just exploded in the past decade. There's never a dull moment.
Q: Work/life balance - is there any?
I reject the premise. There is only life: what one fills it with is a choice, not some balancing exercise that seeks to shield work from the greater whole. For more on that, read Hon. Bridget Mary McCormack and Len Niehoff's—famous lawyers both—essay.
Finally: What advice would you offer for someone interested in this area of law?
If "this area" is legal academia, read legal scholarship, try writing some yourself and ask whether doing that is for you. If not—run away. If so—find some mentor in your field and see what advice they have about becoming an academic. It's a bit of a process and I don't have the space to communicate the finer details here. If "this area," by contrast, is biotech patent law, I'd suggest keeping abreast on developments coming out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and—just as importantly—staying current with all of the technical and business developments in the area; not just Law360 and Bloomberg News, but Cell, Nature, and Science.
