China Needs More Lawyers. Hallelujah. Hallelujah

The Red Kemp Blog has a post up that is music to every lawyer's ears. The Post is entitled, "China Needs More Intellectual Property Rights Experts" and it essentially says China needs more lawyers, or at least that is how I read it.

The post discusses how at a recent forum on "Intellectual Property Rights in Higher Education, Professor Zheng Shengli, dean of the IPR school of Peking University, made the claim that by the year 2010 China will need between 55,000 to 60,000 IPR [intellectual property rights] experts. Professor Zheng called China's universities to produce graduates to meet this demand. Professor Zheng used the following statistics to justify his call for lawyering up:

There were 3.284 million scientific personnel nationwide in 2004, and correspondingly at least 32,800 IPR professionals were needed, he said However, only about 3,000 IPR professionals had been turned out by universities over the past 10 or more years because universities have been slow to teach the subject, Zheng said.

This shortage of IPR professionals "'will hamper the development of IPR protection, which will consequently slow down the progress in scientific and other related research areas,' said Xie Xiaoyong, development director of Research and Development Center of the State Intellectual Property Office," which helped organized the forum.

Red Kemp goes on to pose a question I am dying to answer:

If anyone knows about quality the quality of Chinese Law schools in this regard I would be interested to hear it. Am I the only one who thinks that more IPR professionals doesn’t necessarily equal better protection or enforcement?

My answer, based on my own experience with Chinese lawyers is that the quality of lawyers produced by China’s law schools is pretty good. But even if it were not, the reality is that the more lawyers there are, the more the law tends to get enforced. This is true of IP law as much as any other. The an old adage is that if there is one lawyer in town, the lawyer will starve, but if there are two lawyers, both will prosper.

If there were a couple thousand more IP lawyers in China you can bet they would be looking around to see what they could do and they would be pushing for increased protection of IPR, prosecuting IP violations, and drafting contracts to protect IP.

And would this not be just grand for everybody?