I have analysed numbers over recent years from the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys register, and the data reveals a profession that is effectively running on a treadmill. In January 2018, the register recorded 1,003 attorneys. Today, in mid-2026, that number sits at 1,084 (870 in Australia, 214 in New Zealand).
That is a net addition of just 81 practitioners over more than eight years, translating to a sluggish compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just under 1%. While the profession has managed to register 288 new attorneys since 2018, I found that this influx has been largely offset by a steady rate of retirement: 207 attorneys have departed the register over the same period.
On the surface, a 1% growth rate might simply look like a mature, saturated market. But, when placed in historical context, the situation is concerning. More importantly, it foreshadows a possible existential threat to the profession. If the entry rate of new patent attorneys falls below the rate of senior attrition, the regulatory and commercial ecosystem may stand on shaky ground. And – as always these days – the advancement of AI use within attorney firms threatens to exacerbate this risk.
Is the Senior Cohort of Patent Attorneys in Decline?
I have dug back into the Internet archives to find data that can help to explain the potential consequences of the attrition of senior trans-Tasman patent attorneys.
Finding reliable trans-Tasman baseline data prior to the unified regulatory regime requires a bit of Internet archaeology. However, I was able to unearth archived IP Australia records of the Register from February 2001, which list 405 registered Australian patent attorneys. Adjusting this figure to account for dual-registered (i.e. under the then-separate systems of both Australia and New Zealand) practitioners at the time, and applying the current ratio of approximately four Australian resident attorneys to every one New Zealand resident attorney, I estimate that the entire equivalent Trans-Tasman profession in 2001 consisted of no more than 460 practitioners.
This benchmark puts the recent data into perspective in two crucial ways:
- Almost Fivefold Growth Deceleration: Assuming a growth from 460 practitioners in 2001 to 1,003 in 2018, the profession experienced a CAGR over this period of around 4.6%, as compared with the ~1% rate we have seen over the past eight years.
- The Loss of Mentorship: Assuming that most attorneys, once registered, stay in the profession for at least 20 years, the 207 attorneys who have left the profession since 2018 do not just represent 19% of the current workforce. They represent the possible exit of up to 45% of that highly experienced, 2001-era cohort.
The data suggests, even at a most conservative estimate, that in less than a decade the trans-Tasman profession has lost well over a third – and possibly almost half – of its senior practitioners, with two decades or more of experience. These are the partners, directors, and seasoned professionals who possess the deep institutional knowledge required to evaluate and protect complex technologies, and to navigate complex domestic and international patent strategies. More importantly, under the extensive competency requirements of the trans-Tasman IP attorney qualification regime – including minimum employment and practical experience conditions – these are the exact practitioners the system relies upon to mentor the next generation of attorneys.
The profession is at serious risk of becoming hollowed out at the top. And when I looked at where the replacement talent is actually coming from, it became clear that the pipeline is far more fragile than even these numbers suggest.
Training Asymmetry – The Few Carrying the Many
To understand exactly where the profession's replacement talent is coming from, we need to look at who is doing the heavy lifting. For this, I have extracted the data on the firms and employers associated with newly registered attorneys since January 2018.
Before diving into the numbers, I need to add a few important caveats regarding this data. I am reliant on the information recorded on the official register, which means the table below captures the employer (where identified) recorded at the time a new attorney was first registered. While this does not definitively mean an attorney completed their entire training period with that specific employer, historically, that has been the norm.
You will also notice a few distinct categories in the data:
- ‘NONE’ (31 registrations): This captures attorneys who had no employer originally identified on the register. However, given the strict requirement for supervised practice prior to registration, it would have been necessary for these new attorneys to undergo at least two years of attorney-supervised training across a range of practice areas, even if their employment status was in transition at the time of registration.
- ‘OTHER EMPLOYER’ (34 registrations): This consolidates all employers that had only one newly registered attorney recorded over the eight-and-a-half-year period.
- Fisher & Paykel (11 registrations): The relatively large number of trainees registering from Fisher & Paykel Healthcare – a corporation with in-house attorneys – is surprising (to me). This level of internal training output from a corporate entity is unusual. Whether this reflects a specific internal drive, or whether there is some other anomaly in the data, is not clear.
With those caveats in mind, here is the full breakdown of where the profession's new talent has originated since 2018.
| Firm | New Registrations |
|---|---|
| PIPERS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY | 2 |
| PEARCE IP | 2 |
| LORD & COMPANY | 2 |
| WALLINGTON-DUMMER | 2 |
| CHRYSILIOU IP | 2 |
| RESMED | 2 |
| IP AUSTRALIA | 2 |
| HENRY HUGHES IP | 3 |
| WRAYS | 3 |
| DENTONS | 3 |
| KINGS PATENT & TRADE MARKS ATTORNEYS | 3 |
| CSIRO | 3 |
| JONES TULLOCH | 4 |
| BALDWINS | 4 |
| ALDER IP | 4 |
| ET INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY | 4 |
| SHELSTON IP | 4 |
| JAMES & WELLS | 5 |
| BAXTER IP | 5 |
| MADDERNS | 5 |
| PIZZEYS | 5 |
| PHILLIPS ORMONDE FITZPATRICK | 9 |
| FISHER & PAYKEL HEALTHCARE | 11 |
| DAVIES COLLISON CAVE | 18 |
| FPA PATENT ATTORNEYS | 20 |
| GRIFFITH HACK | 21 |
| A J PARK | 22 |
| SPRUSON & FERGUSON | 26 |
| FB RICE | 27 |
| NONE | 31 |
| OTHER EMPLOYER | 34 |
What immediately jumps out from this data is the gap between Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Davies Collison Cave. That gap illustrates a profound structural asymmetry in how the profession sustains itself.
The training and financial burden of developing new attorneys is concentrated almost entirely within a handful of large practices. In any profession of this relatively small size, such a high concentration of training environments is fundamentally undesirable. Just six firms – FB Rice, Spruson & Ferguson, A J Park, Griffith Hack, FPA Patent Attorneys, and Davies Collison Cave – account for 134 of the 288 new registrations since 2018. The imbalance only becomes greater if we attribute the new attorneys trained at Baldwins (since merged into A J Park) along with Shelston IP and Pizzeys (now merged into Spruson & Ferguson) to the six big firms, which then account for 147 new registrations. That is more than half (51%) of the entire profession's replacement pipeline flowing through just half a dozen major firms.
While the ownership structures of some of these top-tier firms have changed over the past decade, internally their environments remain largely modelled on the traditional hierarchy of partners (now perhaps salaried), associates, junior attorneys and trainees, with the more senior practitioners taking on the roles of mentors and trainers to juniors and trainees.
Set against the broader market trends I have covered previously, this data reveals a highly unequal, and potentially unsustainable, dynamic. The ‘long tail’ of dozens of independent, smaller practices across Australia and New Zealand has been steadily gaining filing share over the past decade. Yet, as the registration data shows, those smaller firms are structurally reliant on the major players to bear the substantial cost and effort of training the talent required to service their growing market.
The trans-Tasman patent profession essentially operates on a subsidised apprenticeship model. Star Trek’s Mr Spock famously observed that ‘logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’, but Spock was not running a business at the time! And competitive pressure is precisely why the likely deployment of AI inside attorney firms represents such a concerning demographic threat.
Automating the Apprenticeship
The primary reason this highly concentrated training structure is under threat is not because AI is poised to replace the patent attorney. Rather, the risk lies in how AI changes the internal economics of junior labour within traditional private practice hierarchies.
There is an important distinction to be made regarding where generative AI has the greatest impact in patent attorney practice. High-level patent drafting, including identifying the core inventive concept, scoping a defensible set of claims, and working with an inventor to articulate a novel concept, remains an expert-in-the-loop process. Here, AI functions as a tool that yields efficiency gains of perhaps 25% to 50% at most; it is not a ‘10x’ automation proposition.
In my view, the true ‘low-hanging fruit’ for internal AI adoption consists of the routine, time-consuming tasks that sit entirely within the administrative and lower-tier professional workflows, including:
- drafting standardised client correspondence and reporting letters;
- conducting initial, routine analysis of examination reports; and
- generating draft examination responses based on past firm precedents.
The dilemma for the profession is that this routine work is exactly the material on which trainees and junior attorneys have traditionally ‘cut their teeth’.
Private practice firms do not generally disclose the extent of their internal AI integration, but intense competitive pressure and margin optimisation will inevitably compel the larger training firms to accelerate AI adoption, if they are not doing so already. If you operate a major practice with a massive, structured repository of past examination reports, standard correspondence, and responses, you have a goldmine of data perfectly suited to automate these routine tasks.
When a senior attorney can use an internal AI system to automate 90% of their routine reporting, correspondence, and file management, the operational necessity for a trainee or junior attorney to handle that work evaporates. The senior practitioner effectively becomes a hyper-efficient operator who no longer requires a junior support structure to maintain high work output.
By optimising these low-level tasks out of the daily workflow, firms simultaneously dismantle the ladder that entry-level practitioners require to step up their knowledge and experience. If the entry-level work disappears, the economic justification for hiring and training a junior cohort vanishes along with it.
Conclusion – Is This a Systemic Crisis in the Making?
As the filing data shows, there is no immediate threat of a sudden collapse in client demand. The actual long-term threat is a quiet, structural hollowing-out from within.
If competitive forces and margin pressures drive the primary training firms to aggressively automate their entry-level workflows, the entry rate of new attorneys may ultimately fall below the baseline retirement rate. Because the regulatory architecture overseen by the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys Board explicitly mandates extensive, high-quality supervised practice to ensure professional competency, the profession cannot simply bypass the traditional apprenticeship model. You cannot build a qualified patent attorney solely in a classroom or via an LLM prompt.
If the replacement pipeline chokes out while the fixed attrition of 20 to 30 senior retirements continues annually, the profession faces a reduction in size combined with a shift towards a top-heavy structure. In the medium term, this will dramatically drive up the cost of experienced talent. In the longer term, it risks wiping out the very institutional memory and mentoring capacity required to qualify future entrants.
The challenge facing the trans-Tasman market is stark. Independent firms are successfully winning filing share, but they are doing so while relying on a shrinking pool of large, traditional practices to subsidise the development of the profession's future workforce. If those major firms decide that internal AI efficiencies mean they can no longer justify the overhead of a large trainee cohort, the entire ecosystem may stall.
As a profession, we pride ourselves on securing the long-term foundations of commercial innovation. I hope that we can apply that same strategic foresight to our own human capital, to successfully navigate the AI transition while ensuring that we continue to develop the next generation of practitioners.
Before You Go…
Thank you for reading this article to the end – I hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful. Almost every article I post here takes a few hours of my time to research and write, and I have never felt the need to ask for anything in return.
But now – for the first, and perhaps only, time – I am asking for a favour. If you are a patent attorney, examiner, or other professional who is experienced in reading and interpreting patent claims, I could really use your help with my PhD research. My project involves applying artificial intelligence to analyse patent claim scope systematically, with the goal of better understanding how different legal and regulatory choices influence the boundaries of patent protection. But I need data to train my models, and that is where you can potentially assist me. If every qualified person who reads this request could spare just a couple of hours over the next few weeks, I could gather all the data I need.
The task itself is straightforward and web-based – I am asking participants to compare pairs of patent claims and evaluate their relative scope, using an online application that I have designed and implemented over the past few months. No special knowledge is required beyond the ability to read and understand patent claims in technical fields with which you are familiar. You might even find it to be fun!
There is more information on the project website, at claimscopeproject.net. In particular, you can read:
- a detailed description of the study, its goals and benefits; and
- instructions for the use of the online claim comparison application.
Thank you for considering this request!
Mark Summerfield
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