FICPI’s Professional Excellence Committee (known as PEC) focuses on how intellectual property attorneys do business as IP firms and thus complements the work carried out by FICPI’s Study and Work Committee (known by its French acronym, CET), which looks at the laws and the offices that we deal with daily.
PEC was established in 2008 to deal with matters of professional practice, with the objective of maintaining the standards of the IP profession to the highest level and further developing them, in addition to FICPI committees focusing on patent and trade mark issues already in FICPI.
PEC aims to provide information and guidance to FICPI members about practice management, to support firms in their everyday business life and development.
Therefore, PEC organises the Practice Management stream of FICPI’s educational meetings, such as its Open Forums, including sessions on the profession as a business.
PEC takes the lead in matters of continuing professional development, the promotion of standards and best practices, and the profession as a business. PEC helps by identifying trends in the profession and IP marketplace as well as challenges in the profession, and offers targeted advice.
It also deals with practical issues relating to IP asset management, IP valuation, litigation insurance and the like.
PEC is organised into working groups and any member is free to raise any issue that might be of concern to them and of interest to other firms.
Some of the current PEC working groups are:
- Reaction against the new competition from service providers (BRACE)
- Pricing methods and fee structure
- IP valuation
- IP practice management benchmarking questionnaire
- Best practices when automating workflow in an IP firm
- Profit generation in IP firms
PEC has also produced publications such as “Guidelines for Communications between IP Firms” and its “Report on Six Sigma Projects in IP Law Firms”. FICPI's library of IP Practice Management Guides is available to all members.
Any member of FICPI is welcome to join PEC, share their knowledge and experience, present on a specific topic, or raise any current issue and discuss it with colleagues who might encounter the same concerns.
