There is a quiet irony at the heart of the Indian intellectual property profession that rarely surfaces in professional forums – assuming those forums are functioning and well-attended, which is itself part of the problem. This is a profession whose entire purpose is to protect the fruits of human ingenuity: the patent that rewards a decade of research, the trademark that stands behind a brand’s promise, the design that reflects months of creative effort. IP professionals understand, perhaps better than any other professional community, what it means when knowledge is appropriated without credit and when someone benefits from another’s effort without permission or acknowledgement.<\/p>\n
And yet, when it comes to its own professional community, the Indian IP ecosystem practices something that runs strikingly counter to all of that. It is a profession that has, by and large, failed to build a genuine fraternity. What exists instead is a loose assembly of individual practices, each guarding its own terrain, rarely sharing anything of substance across firm boundaries, and at times using the tools of competition in ways that cross over into something less defensible.<\/p>\n
This piece is not written to be comfortable. It is written because the profession deserves an honest account of itself.<\/p>\n
The competitive habits that define the Indian IP community did not originate at law school or in patent agent training. They began much earlier.<\/p>\n
India’s education system has, for generations, operated on a logic of engineered scarcity. The number of seats at premier institutions has been structurally insufficient relative to the population competing for them. Entrance examinations like IIT-JEE and NEET do not merely test knowledge – they are designed to separate, rank, and eliminate. With admission rates at premier institutes as low as 0.1 percent, the system sends a clear and consistent message to every student within it: there is not enough for everyone, and advancement is built on someone else’s failure.<\/p>\n
The habits of mind this instils – guard your notes, treat the person next to you as a rival rather than a colleague, share nothing that could reduce your advantage – do not dissolve when those students enter professional life. They persist. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Knowledge Management<\/em>, based on a survey of 203 employees across Indian organizations, found that knowledge hoarding is a generic, non-intentional behavior, and that without deliberate structural intervention, it tends to remain the default. The Indian IP profession has built no such structures. The outcome is exactly what one would expect.<\/p>\n It is worth being precise, because “lack of camaraderie” can sound like a complaint about insufficient social interaction. It is not.<\/p>\n In practical terms, it means that IP professionals in India do not share knowledge across firm boundaries as a matter of professional culture. There is no functioning equivalent of AIPLA in the United States – a national bar association where IP practitioners, patent agents, academics, and corporate professionals genuinely exchange insights, collaborate on systemic issues, and build relationships that are not purely transactional. India’s IP associations exist, and some are active in their own ways, but they do not operate as genuine communities of practice. The knowledge that practitioners develop over careers – prosecution strategies, examiner tendencies, lessons from failed oppositions – stays largely within the firms where it was accumulated and rarely flows into the broader professional pool.<\/p>\n It means that young IP professionals have limited access to mentorship from experienced practitioners outside their own organizations. What mentorship exists tends to be proprietary: available within the firm, available to those the firm considers worth investing in. The profession has never built the cross-firm knowledge infrastructure that would elevate the quality of practice across the board.<\/p>\n It also means that the profession has no collective voice. When significant regulatory changes occur – amendments to prosecution rules, examination guidelines, fee structures – the response from the IP professional community tends to be fragmented. Individual firms interpret and adapt. A coherent, organized position that represents the interests of the profession as a whole is conspicuously absent.<\/p>\n The absence of cooperation would be damaging enough. The issue, however, goes further.<\/p>\n In the Indian IP ecosystem, competition between practitioners has, in a meaningful number of instances, moved from the legitimate to the harmful.<\/strong><\/span> These behaviors are familiar to most practitioners of any standing, even if they are rarely discussed openly.<\/p>\n There is the practice of undermining a peer’s reputation through indirect channels – a quiet observation about a competitor’s reliability slipped into a conversation with a shared foreign associate, a suggestion that a rival’s prosecution quality leaves something to be desired. None of this is traceable. The referral simply stops arriving. The damage, when it lands, is real and lasting.<\/p>\n There is the use of fee competition not as a market mechanism but as an instrument of harm – pricing structured not to win work on merit but to signal that a competitor’s rates are unjustifiable, regardless of the quality that underlies them. The Supreme Court has had occasion to address, in Bar Council of Maharashtra v. M.V. Dahbolkar<\/em>, a situation where advocates literally jostled at courthouse entrances to intercept clients and undercut each other’s fees. The IP profession’s equivalent is more discreet but not entirely different in character.<\/p>\n There is also the manner in which practitioners sometimes depart firms – taking not just the clients they have personally developed but the institutional infrastructure built around those clients: the docketing knowledge, the file history, the paralegal who understood the client’s technology. Competitive practice permits much of this. Professional norms, where they exist, ask something more of people.<\/p>\n Underlying all of it is a structural trust deficit that research has documented across the Indian professional landscape. A global study by Right Management and Tucker International, covering business leaders from thirteen countries, found that Indian executives ranked lowest on the competency of instilling trust – described in the study as “the glue that holds diverse teams together.” In a profession that ought to function as a community, that deficit has compounding consequences.<\/p>\n Alongside the more direct forms of professional competition sits a quieter, more insidious dynamic – the inflation of credentials through awards and rankings that are, in meaningful part, commercially engineered.<\/p>\n The global legal ranking industry is a substantial commercial operation. The business of legal directories – covering submissions, events, and awards – is estimated to be worth in excess of USD 250 million annually. Participation in rankings such as IAM Patent 1000, IP Stars, World Trademark Review, and their equivalents requires formal submissions, and in many cases those submissions sit alongside paid event sponsorships, advertising arrangements, and “partnership” packages that directories offer to firms. The relationship between a firm’s financial engagement with a directory and its eventual ranking is not always as arm’s-length as the directories’ editorial language implies.<\/p>\n At the lower end of the spectrum, the dynamic is more transparent still. Research into business awards programs globally has found that an estimated 85 percent of major awards programs guarantee some form of recognition to every paying participant. Vanity awards – those where the “award” is effectively a commercial transaction dressed in the language of achievement – are well documented. Some are explicit about it in their fine print, where disclosures acknowledge that references to excellence or distinction apply to the publication itself and not to any individual named recipient. The award is a product. The firm is the customer.<\/p>\n In the Indian IP context, this matters because the awards ecosystem has become one of the primary ways in which firms signal quality to clients – and one of the primary ways in which practitioners signal status to each other. A partner whose email signature carries four directory rankings and two regional awards is presumed, in the absence of other information, to be excellent. The presumption is frequently unwarranted. What the signature actually records, in many cases, is a firm’s willingness to invest in submissions, attend award dinners, and maintain commercial relationships with the publications that produce the rankings.<\/p>\n The damage this causes to the profession is specific. It displaces genuine meritocracy. The boutique firm with exceptional prosecution outcomes but no business development budget to invest in directory submissions will not appear in the rankings. The larger firm with a dedicated submissions team and an advertising relationship with three IP publications will. The rankings, therefore, reflect to a significant degree the marketing capacity of firms rather than the quality of their work.<\/strong> <\/span>And when practitioners use those rankings to assess peers – to decide whom to refer to, whom to trust, whom to take seriously – they are basing their judgements on a signal that has been partially purchased.<\/p>\n The profession does not hold itself accountable, and the reason is structural. Practitioners who have at some point benefited from a competitor’s difficulty, or built a profile through directory submissions rather than public advocacy, are not well-positioned to object when they observe the same dynamics playing out around them. The community has no mechanism for self-correction because accountability requires transparency, transparency requires trust, and trust is precisely what has never been cultivated here<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n The result is institutional silence: the profession knows what goes on, discusses it privately, shrugs collectively, and continues. The things that would require genuine courage to name remain unnamed.<\/p>\n A community that does not cooperate, that at times actively undermines itself, and that has allowed a commercial recognition industry to substitute for genuine merit assessment, does not simply harm its own members. It degrades the quality of the ecosystem it operates within.<\/p>\n When knowledge is not shared across the profession, the quality of practice is lower than it could be – particularly for practitioners in smaller cities and organisations without deep institutional resources. When the profession speaks with no collective voice, the regulatory environment improves more slowly than it should. When rankings are partly purchased, the information available to those who engage the profession is systematically distorted.<\/p>\n We draft agreements that enable joint ventures between competing companies. We advise clients on patent pools that allow rivals to share technology for mutual benefit. We explain to innovators that protecting intellectual property is not about hoarding – it is about creating conditions under which sharing becomes possible and sustainable.<\/p>\n It would be worth asking, with some regularity, whether the same logic applies to the profession itself. The Indian IP ecosystem has the expertise, the scale, and the international reach to be genuinely influential – in policy, in practice, and in the development of IP culture in a country that urgently needs it. Building toward that influence requires the one thing the profession has been most reluctant to invest in: each other.<\/p>\n Intellepedia welcomes responses to this piece from IP professionals across practice areas and seniority levels.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Authored by Gaurav Mishra, IP Attorney, BananaIP Counsels<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" India’s IP professionals protect everyone’s intellectual property. They just haven’t figured out how to protect the integrity of their own profession. A candid look at the competition, rivalry, and bought recognition that defines one of India’s most technically capable – and most fractured professional communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":149663,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":30,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28],"tags":[12737,12727,12734,1258,12746,12748,12726,12732,12743,12731,11956,12735,12729,12736,12741,12728,12733,12739,11978,12745,12747,4870,753,12749,12730,12742,12744,6335,12740,12738],"class_list":["post-149661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-intellectual-property","category-general","tag-iam-patent-1000","tag-indian-legal-profession","tag-industry-commentary","tag-intellectual-property-india","tag-ip-bar-association","tag-ip-camaraderie","tag-ip-community","tag-ip-culture","tag-ip-ecosystem-india","tag-ip-firms-india","tag-ip-profession","tag-ip-professionals-india","tag-ip-rankings","tag-ip-stars","tag-knowledge-hoarding","tag-knowledge-sharing","tag-legal-awards","tag-legal-directories","tag-legal-profession-india","tag-legal-rankings-india","tag-patent-agent-india","tag-patent-attorneys","tag-patent-law-india","tag-professional-community-india","tag-professional-ethics","tag-professional-rivalry","tag-scarcity-mindset","tag-trademark-law-india","tag-vanity-awards","tag-world-trademark-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149661"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149665,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149661\/revisions\/149665"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What the absence of Camaraderie actually looks like<\/h2>\n
When Competition moves beyond the Acceptable<\/h2>\n
The Recognition Industry: Buying the Appearance of Excellence<\/h2>\n
Why nobody says anything<\/h2>\n
What this Costs the Profession<\/h2>\n