About JDD Consultants

JDD Consultants was established in 1983 by Dr Denis Derbyshire. As head of the Business Faculty at Slough College, Dr Derbyshire had organised short courses on intellectual property since the early 1970s, in response to requests from members of the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents (CIPA) and the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA).

We believe there are four key ingredients to the success of our courses:

• The key factor has been our ability to recruit experienced and skilled lecturers. We are grateful for their support and co-operation.
• The emphasis of our courses is on intensive skills development and learning. Consequently, we select venues with state-of-the-art training facilities, but supported with leisure amenities for any post-course free time. We also keep course sizes typically down to between 8-20 members and have two tutors on many of the courses.
• The residential element has been an important feature of our courses. It helps bring together the Patent community, with ideas and approaches shared among students and between students and lecturers, and it builds up contacts for future years. The Covid-19 crisis meant that all our 2020 courses had to be held online (using Zoom and MS Teams), but we hope to be able to hold some in person courses in July and August 2021.
• Our courses are designed to hone knowledge and examination technique and highlight any significant gaps in a student’s knowledge, but are also interactive, with break-out and ‘task’ sessions. For the Foundation Certificate courses, there is greater emphasis on imparting knowledge, so that extensive course notes and handouts are provided. For the Final Diploma courses, there is a focus on practice of exam questions and developing technique, but for FD1 (P2) there is also a ‘Tour’ of the key sections of the Patents Act. We expect students to come to courses well prepared and provide guidance on pre-course reading, with pre-course work set for many of the courses. However, we also ensure, through course timing, that there remains time for any gaps and weaknesses to be addressed.

Since 2016 our face-to-face courses have been supported also by an online Moodle resources and communication forum. This connects course attendees, with the aim of fostering a ‘learning community’ which develops pre and post course. The forum also contains a number of resources exclusive to our courses.