How Speed Reading helps a Patent Attorney

Speed Reading helps me to save a lot of time and to provide much better work results, as compared with my colleagues and peers:

• when doing case law research, finding the needle in the haystack,
• when doing prior art searches, bulldozing through thousands of pdf files,
• in hearings before patent offices and courts (my favorite), when I have to find literal support for a claim amendment that saves the patent in suit from being revoked,
• in identifying potentially problematic passages in long and complicated contracts,
• going through my email inbox and deleting those messages that I do not need to read, just by reading the sender name and the subject line,
• and many more.

How to Learn Speed Reading

First: check your own reading speed. You will see that this has nothing to do with “diagonal reading”.

Copy this page’s text, and go to www.spreeder.com. Paste the text into the box at the screen, as shown below

Then click the green “SPREED!” button and you will be forwarded to this page:

Press the “+” key several times until the reading speed is “500” (see above).

Press the “start” button. And read.

You need Training if Your Reading Speed is lower than 500 wpm

If you do not read fast – at least 500 words per minute – you need daily training.

Please note again that this has nothing to do with “diagonal reading”.

The tool that will help get your reading getting up to speed – and then keep you there for the rest of your life – is called Spreeder: www.spreeder.com

Once you know it, you will never want to go back again.

Please note: there is also a difference between “reading and understanding” a text and “reading and remembering” a text. I can read and understand a text fast, but not remember it after having fast read it. “Rainman” could possibly remember a fast read text (watch it!), but not me.

For my work as a patent attorney, fast “reading and understanding” a text is more than enough. Nobody would expect me to have a photographic memory.

The good thing is that speed reading is like riding a bicycle. Once you know how to do it you will never again forget it. Because you automatically train it on a daily basis.

Call to Action

Measure your current reading speed.

Then give yourself initially two assignments each day. Begin each day with ten minutes reading Spreeder. Until your reading speed is “750”, better “1,000”.

If I can do that then you can do it, too.

Start today.

Martin “fast pace” Schweiger