Unlock the Power of Electronic Signature Legality for Assignment of Intellectual Property in United Kingdom

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joining uh but i'll just start with an introduction because our webinars always recorded so you'll be able anyone that joins later would be able to catch up anyway and so welcome my name is charlotte burton i'm as the marketing manager um at the center for commercial law studies and queen mary um you might have seen me before if you join some of our other um webinars that we're hosting at ccls and today we're hosting a taster lecture um on intellectual property law and with my colleague duncan here who i will let himself uh introduce himself um just shortly um that how the session will run today um is uh i will pass over to duncan shortly and he will run a taster lecture for you and please feel free um to ask questions and based on the topic in the q a or the chat function you've got here on zoom um we haven't got any of the admissions team here today um so we ask that if you if you have any ambitious questions i will put um our email address um for the team um into the chat here so you can get in touch with them um i can help on very limited um content on that and if there are questions that you have um you can ask and i will i can try as best as possible but i won't be directing any of them to duncan um as he is an academic and doesn't doesn't have to worry about that kind of thing for any any uh topic related iep related questions and please feel free and to ask away and we'll have a short q and a section at the end where you can ask those questions um so i can see we've had a few more join um in that time uh so i think um duncan if you're happy i'll kind of pass over to you thank you charlotte um hello everybody um nice to meet you all uh and great to see you um posting in the chat all these amazing places that you are at the moment um so just by way of introduction i'm going to share my screen with you and show you a useful website um it's the website for our um queen mary intellectual property research institute so along with the llm program all the academics who work in different specialisms of the law are located for the purposes of our research in different institutes so if you're interested in ip at queen mary i really recommend you can probably see at the top bar there it's just the usual qmul dot ac dot uk address and then slash q m i p r i and that stands for of course queen mary intellectual property research institute that will not only show you the types of research the academics are doing including this about covid which is what your taster lecture is going to be about in a minute but also if you click the tab for people you can see there's a picture of me there and if i click on that you can see all the faculty members and the reason that i wanted to show you this was partly um because queen mary has the largest faculty of ip full-time academics anywhere in europe um so in a minute i'm going to explain a little bit about the llm modules available for the specialism and the reason that we're able to offer so many different ip courses within the llm is because we've got this amazing faculty of um full-time members of staff so now let me stop showing my screen so you got the address for that it's uh the usual queen mary or that's the members page but if i go back to the main page if you just type q-m-i-p-r-i or you can just do an internet search for that in a search engine and have a look at our amazing website okay so if i stop sharing and i will now get ready to share the slides with you about the overview of the specialism so i'm going to share my screen i'll put that link in the chat for you duncan thank you charlotte that's great there you go so if i just go to full screen mode um this is now an overview of the different modules that you can take as part of the ip llm specialism at queen mary i'll explain some technical stuff about the number of credits that you need to get for the modules etc and also come back to this point that actually we've got the largest number of different types of intellectual property that you can study in different modules anywhere in europe okay so if you're attending this meeting i'm presuming you know already what ip is but it's instructive to remember that when we talk about patents and copyrights and trademarks um quite often at universities they will have a single course which covers all these main types of intellectual property rights and of course in some countries they still refer to industrial property so industrial property are registered rights such as patents and trademarks and then have a separate category of ip called copyright but what we do at queen mary is we break down these different components um into many many different specialized courses so we go much deeper and into much more detail on each of these topics which of course allows us to have amazing discussions with students about patents on drugs and what happens to vaccines during the covet pandemic the smartphone wars who owns the patents on the uh network technology like g4 g5 interconnectivity of course copyrights um and particularly relating to online infringement of music um art etc uh trademarks um relating to things like logos and signs and in addition we even have separate courses on what we call hybrid rights that are as kind of a mix of of patents copyrights and trademarks or a specialist to particular fields of technology so gi's are geographical indications uh such as the names of you know cheese from france or um a wine from germany etc certain names are protected as geographical indications um unfair competition uh also becomes important because if you are the owner of an intellectual property right this does not mean you can do whatever you want with it so if you abuse your dominant position as the ip right holder you could be found contrary to competition law uh by the competition enforcement agency in your territory we also have specialist modules and in fact a specialized professor dealing only with design rights so there's a separate type of registered design right in most major ip systems database rights even plant variety rights and i was talking to my students recently about a big american company called monsanto who developed a new type of agricultural crop which is drought resistant so if it doesn't rain for many months the plant doesn't die in the farmer's field it just waits for the rain to start again but of course this is protected by something called a plant variety right because of the innovation of this company in producing this new type of plant so access to that is limited because you need to get a license from the company that owns the plant variety rights so i'll come back in a minute to how these kind of themes in intellectual property are organized in our offering of modules um but just to get the what i call the technical bit out of the way you will know already that to obtain an llm from queen mary you need to accumulate 40 credits in total so you need to pass enough modules or a dissertation to take you to a total of 180 credits um so in order to get a degree which is an a specialism llam in intellectual property you need to take uh either you can take all the modules in intellectual property or maybe you want to take some modules in banking or tax or arbitration etc and in that case uh you need to take a minimum of 150 credits so you could still take 30 credits from another a module um or you can do a dissertation we have an optional dissertation for the intellectual property specialism so it's not compulsory to do a dissertation um so this is basically the the different um possibilities which you'll have time to consider before you enroll for the llm about what modules do you want to take what's going to be used most useful for your career what you're interested in and how you create this kind of mix which will come to a total of 180 credits so essentially our modules in ip specialism either they are 30 credit modules which means they will run for 11 weeks in one semester or they are 15 credit modules which means they will run for five weeks so for half of a semester um and here is like a if you like a typology of the different types of modules to kind of explain them as easily as possible so there are modules with like broad coverage so my colleague professor um teaches a module called global ip law which deals with global problems of intellectual property and one of the things that queen mary is most famous for in ip is the second thing on this list what we call the international comparative subjects in copyright patents trademarks and unfair competition because what we do not do at queen mary we do not teach the english law of intellectual property we are an international university uh i think all of my colleagues all the full-time there are 13 of us who are full-time professors i think the other 12 are from countries outside the uk so international faculty and we teach international law to international students secondly uh we then uh deal with what i called here industry focused coverage things like design law uh business to film ip and fashion how to commercialize and make money from your intellectual property for example through licensing agreement interactive entertainment law which is like gaming online gaming ip in china esports life sciences which i teach creative industries and then finally the specialist specialist perspectives of things like animal law media and culture digital ip and geographical indications and we essentially divide up the modules as logically as we can into the three semesters so semester one or semester a you can see just an example this is just a snapshot from the year we're just finishing of the different modules that you could choose in semester a and these are again a mix of 30 credit and 15 credit modules modules in semester b this was from january until march this year and again we offered a broad range of modules that the children's students can choose and in module c these are all 15 credit modules so they're shorter because this is only a five week semester which we're going to finish uh in the next and in the next weeks and again you see more specialists than uh in in the early semesters of the term so that's essentially what i wanted to show you in terms of the outline of the module so i've already used 11 minutes of my time and what i'm going to do next is share my screen with you again and give you a sample lecture so let me get my slides ready by the way we've been um back to we've been teaching on on campus so in person for uh the whole of this academic year um and we've been teaching sort of in uh hybrid format so for example if any of the students need to self-isolate or are not able to attend uh we've had this facility where the students can follow online as well uh but i myself and the other professors we're physically in the classroom so everything has been online um after the problems of the previous years of the pandemic which brings me conveniently to the topic of the calvin 19 pandemic and this is a real life lecture that i gave to my students enrolled for the module in the international law of patents and related rights and what i mean by related rights are things like these plant variety protection rights that i gave an example of a minute ago and also things like trade secrets and confidential information where a company decides not to apply for a patent but instead to keep the invention secret and confidential so i'm going to give you a short taster lecture where i explain now we hope the pandemic is you know reducing in its impact in the world so what lessons can we learn for the european patent system for example well this is a very topical issue because if you look at the dates at the top of the slide you will see that um starting on sunday until yesterday there was a world trade organization ministerial meeting taking place in geneva in switzerland and as you'll be aware the world trade organization is um an international organization which was created and came into force in 1995 and administers trade in goods and services but also through something called the trips agreement administers trade in intellectual property rights and the as you'll see as i go through these slides one of the uh controversial uh topics for negotiation at the ministerial conference this week was whether in response to the kovid 19 pandemic wto member countries should in their national law and procedure be allowed to [Music] temporarily set aside their obligations to have national laws which observe rights on patents and related rights and and this is something called the trips waiver and you probably have seen it in the media describe discussed as a very controversial topic so having said that this uh meeting would finish yesterday on the 15th of june you'll see already this is an announcement a screenshot from the website which explains that essentially they didn't reach agreement on the future of ip rights during the pandemic so they have extended for another day the negotiations to find a solution to how countries should have to uh implement their ip laws during the pandemic plus other other trade issues about fishing and food shortages and agriculture but ip vaccines and covidraxes is one of the most controversial topics being discussed right now today in geneva so let's go back and recall how and why um this controversial issue of ip and patents came about you will recall that on the 31st of december 2019 [Music] government officials in the chinese city of wuhan started to report unusual numbers of people who had visited the seafood wholesale market who were reporting symptoms of a new type of pneumonia that hadn't been recorded in hospitals before and um by january of that of 2020 the wuhan outbreak came to be called clovid19 and was designated by the world health organization as an international incident and by march of 2020 was designated as a global pandemic well very significant in the global response to the pandemic was a chinese virologist a professor zhang who went online and shared through the internet the genome sequencing for the covin-19 virus so that um potential vaccine manufacturers around the world could see that spike protein like the crown shape with the little spikes of kovid that we're now so familiar with so he was really a hero of this story because he went ahead and shared this information online so that researchers could start to develop vaccines and speed up the process because they actually knew what covey 19 looked like of course at that time the outbreak was only within china so they needed to get hold of samples of the genome sequencing so the race to find a vaccine then gained pace and you'll remember through spring or in england spring so run march and april 2020 we began to see media stories that um uh german company uh biontech uh to who later partnered with the american company pfizer moderna astrazeneca partnering with oxford university um and others started to develop vaccines for covered 19 and the controversy that i'm going to describe that relates to patents is of course that the patent system is designed to incentivize expensive research and development so that these type of companies will have an economic incentive to produce and research new vaccines or other types of technologies and the patent right gives the owner of these technologies the right to exclude others without their consent from making using selling importing or keeping the patented product so coming back to the wto the big question is um will a decision today uh on the 16th of june help to make available the patents by removing the obligation for particularly developing countries in africa southeast asia latin america if you remove the obligation of governments to enforce the ip rights of these vaccine manufacturers will it and label local companies for example in south africa or thailand or desh to make their own cheap versions of the vaccines and to make them available to their local populations in the public interest and if we do that do we then undermine the whole purpose of the patent system which is to incentivize further research so the developing countries would like to see this but the vaccine manufacturers are saying but wait if you do this we will never have an incentive to invent a new drug ever again because our patent rights will be undermined and ultimately our profits will be taken away so just to show you a couple of uh graphics to to show you the the extent of in a way how successful the vaccine response has been by the end of last year uh 12.5 billion coveted vaccines um had been manufactured and so this is a major success of the patent system you could argue that the patent system incentivized this you know it was compared to landing a human being on the moon the speed uh in which you know highly effective vaccines were manufactured by multiple biotech companies so it was a huge success and achievement for the world however that is not to take away from the fact that uh the scale of the pandemic has led to you know tragic deaths of um more than six million people these figures uh i looked i was checking in april um and so despite the fact that most of the vaccine manufactured had been administered of course the problem is that the vaccines were predominantly in the rich developed countries in europe and north america in particular and that the poorer developing countries in the global south were still awaiting the delivery of vaccines and because of ip rights could not manufacture their own version of the drug without infringing ip rights so this has led to something which is called vaccine inequality and here you can see from selected countries see i've chosen the united kingdom israel and france where you know this is uh even from a snapshot from september last year and these are this is for the whole population including babies so if you were to take out the infants you would probably find that i know in the uk it's something close to 90 percent of the population have received at least one dose of a vaccine and compare this to some uh uh west african and central african countries where there are still less than one percent of the population have received the vaccines so it's this vaccine inequality which has led to calls for this so-called ip waiver so that countries would be free to manufacture their own version of these technologies so why is it that countries have to enforce patent rights and related rights which then could become problematic for um the availability of covert 19 vaccines well here's a picture of the signing ceremony this is from april 20 april 1994 and it's the signing ceremony which ensured that the wto the world trade organization agreement on trips came into force and immediately uh it meant that developing countries which had previously excluded from patentability pharmaceutical products inventions and india did this resulted this many other middle income and low income developing countries had said in the public interest we will refuse to grant patents on pharmaceutical products well of course in the 1990s we had a pandemic it was the hiv aids pandemic so very soon after the signing of the trips agreement and the obligation that developing countries would now have to in in ance with article 27 of the trips agreement grant patents for pharmaceutical product inventions the attention focused on something that we now call trips flexibilities that there are possibilities which are safeguards in the wto agreement which say that a country can take emergency measures and set aside patent rights in the public interest and foremost among these safeguards is something called compulsory licensing which is particularly useful when a country can designate a national emergency and give a local manufacturer the ability to manufacture for example a drug product without this constituting a patent infringement without getting the authorization of the right holder and as of january 2017 there was an amendment to the trips agreement which actually said even a rich developed developed country can designate a national emergency which is taking place in another country and manufactured under this so-called compulsory license for export and in fact this happened uh once when canada exported drugs for hiv aids and exported them under compulsory license to rwanda so a cheaper what we call a generic version a copy of the patented medicine without the patent on his consent well the problem with the carving 19 pandemic is that these compulsory licensing amendments have not proved to be a solution to the lack of vaccines available during the pandemic um so if we fast forward to the pandemic and we'll start to look at why this has not been a sufficient solution the pandemic has raised controversies about whether companies like biontech pfizer and astrazeneca moderna are making unreasonable profits because of course they're applying for and presumably will be granted there's always a time delay usually a pattern is granted three years after you apply to the patent examiners for patent office for this so soon we will start to see patents being granted but companies are already worried that they would infringe if they started to manufacture even on what is called a patent pending so a patent which has not yet been granted um and this is the reason why in october 2020 a proposal was made to the wto by the delegations of india and south africa to the world trade organization that because the compulsory license system is not an effective mechanism to ensure access to vaccines and other healthcare technologies like ventilators or treatments or pcr or antigen tests all these things are protected by patents and other ip rights that countries should be allowed at national level to decide that they will not enforce these ip rights on kovid 19 related health healthcare technologies during the pandemic so this is the proposal that today is being negotiated at the wto so keep an eye on social media later and watch out to see whether an agreement is reached and whether then this is criticized as being you know too weak to solve the problem because at the moment we know that the united kingdom and switzerland in particular are trying to water down the impact of this um but the united states supports this and this was a really big surprise that on the 5th of may last year the united states trade representative ambassador catherine thai she tweeted this press release to say that the united states supported the approach of india and south africa to call for the so-called waiver of the trips obligations for covet-19 vaccines it was interesting because the u.s is only supporting the waiver of i.p on the vaccines whereas india and south africa and their supporters about 80 countries are supporting them at the wto are calling for a much more general waiver on the other types of technologies that i described like uh cov19 tests antigen tests and diagnostics and treatments as well as the vaccines themselves so you can see how the negotiations start to get tricky depending on what you consider to be the essential healthcare technology now the day after the united states trade representative tweeted the support for the waiver on the vaccines the chief executive officer of moderna gave an interview on the sixth of may last year saying and almost like like boasting and saying anyone trying to reproduce modernist vaccines we'll have to figure out how to make the messenger rna the mrna uh which is of course at the heart of the the vaccine and that they haven't told you how to make the vaccine in the patents and that's weird because the whole point of the patent system is that you are granted protection afforded by the patent for 20 years from the filing date typically and in return you have to tell someone who is skilled in the art how to make your invention so at the end of the patent term they can go away and make their own version and similarly if there's a compulsory license or the patents are waves you should be able to read the set of instructions in the patent document and make the thing so it's very odd that he's saying you still want to be able to do that even if you read the patent document around the same time on the 4th of june last year the european union delegation to the world trade organization proposed a different approach and i've highlighted in yellow on the next slide what the eu approach was so instead of supporting the india south africa proposal in the way that the united states had done the eu proposal called on governments to use compulsory licensing within the existing trips agreement which already provides this type of flexibility when there is a national health emergency but as we've just seen there are reasons why the compulsory licensing system won't work part of that is that companies who are making the vaccines and applying for patents are not disclosing enough information so it's an insufficient legal mechanism compulsory licenses only gives you access to the patented technology whereas the chief executive modena was saying we are basically using trade secrets and know-how plus we have all the clinical trials data which is kept secret to prove that the drug works safely and effectively and we're not going to give you access to any of that because the compulsory license or waiver will only be on the patents and in fact uh the central american uh the latin american country of bolivia actually tried to use the compulsory license system in may of it last year and found that no country wanted to give a compulsory license for of on the vaccine technology to manufacture and to export and help help the bolivian population and the reason is of course that countries were instead engaged in what became known as vaccine nationalism trying to keep the vaccines for themselves rather than sharing with other countries so that's another reason why because the vaccine manufacturers are all working at total capacity it's been difficult to get countries to help each other through the intended compulsory licensing flexibilities of the trips agreement so i'm coming to the end of my talk now i think i've got three more slides after this and i'll go through those quickly in february of this year i published a article online it's free to download if you're interested in today's topic and it's since then in april was published in a journal called the european intellectual property review and in the journal article i go through some of the analysis that i've shown you today about the problems that have occurred during the pandemic and lessons that the european patent system perhaps could learn and as you will probably know in europe we have a regional ip office it's called the epo european patent office and the examining division to look at patent applications is based in munich in germany so in my journal article i look at three uh articles in the european patent convention the first of these is on the publication of european patents and basically what it says in article 93 of the european patent convention is that when an applicant applies for a european pattern for example on the covet 19 vaccines um the epo will publish this application including a description about how the invention works on its website 18 months after the patent application is filed in my article i say why do we have to wait for 18 months because this is causing a lot of doubt and confusion during the current pandemic because we don't yet know what what patent applications have been made this all this information is kept confidential and secret so in my article i suggest early publication of patent applications might remove uncertainties about whether in future patent infringement would would occur if a country were to manufacture the vaccine without authorization and also would help countries to negotiate licenses because often the way you commercialize your patent is to sign licensing agreements in different countries and actually this might be helpful if people already know in advance what patent applications are likely to lead to patent patents granted in the future so that was my number one proposal early publication of patent applications the second thing which i recommend is improving the disclosure requirement article 83 of the european patent convention that's to say returning to the point about the moderna chief executive saying even if you had a compulsory license or waived rip you still wouldn't know how to make the invention because we haven't told you how to do that in our patent application but actually under article 83 of the trips agreement you must do this you must disclose to a person skilled in the art how to repeat the inventive concept so i proposed something called raising the bar so raising the standard of uh that an applicant has to meet in terms of the information uh that they disclose when they tell how to make the invention you must prove that the invention will work if you follow the instructions written in the patent document and my third proposal is the most radical and i'm not sure that i even support this but i explain what it is okay so i know we've got students online from india so in india there is a provision in section 66 of the indian patents act which states that a patent which has already been granted by the indian patent office can later be revoked by the courts in india on grounds that the enjoyment of those patent rights is contrary to the public interest and there are already three examples from uh past jurisprudence where the indian courts have actually said yeah the existence of this pattern limits the access and the number of companies that can manufacture the product sometimes these are agrochemical products sometimes they are drug products so we are going to take away that patent right forever we'll permanently revoke this because it's against the public interest now that's the indian law now in the european uh patent convention in article 138 we don't have such a radical solution um a patent can only be revoked if the court decides that actually it doesn't meet the standard of we would expect that the invention is new it has inventive step and is capable of being used in a practical way and gives a full and sufficient disclosure of how to work the invention we don't have this public interest grounds for revocation exists in india so i point out that this does exist in other jurisdictions and that perhaps in the future the european patent convention should consider this and my other proposals as we prepare for the next pandemic so very much now the debate is about pandemic preparedness we knew this pandemic was coming we haven't had a pandemic since 1919 but there will be others we hope that they won't be worse than the kovid 19 pandemic but in any case the patent systems around the world must be ready for the next pandemic so thank you for listening i will shop start sharing my screen and hand back to charlotte lovely thank you duncan um that was really interesting and not something that i'd thought about obviously from a marketing background so although we do touch on iep in marketing so um so really good um i've i've put into the the chat if anyone has any questions on on the topic please elsewhere there's not been any while you've been talking which i'm sure is because they're so engaged in what you're saying rather than being distracted in the chat um there was a couple of questions just from actually the beginning few slides that you and you presented duncan so um someone has asked about um the uh qmi pri that's right isn't it the acronym yeah we're not we're never sure how to say it some of my colleagues say q q-m-i-p-r-i some say quemipri some say crimpy so whatever whatever you're comfortable with there's enough acronyms is there it as a yeah it could be in uh queen mary so someone's asked about um if our llm candidates pursuing the ipr special specialization allowed to join and work on initiatives um in the research institution yes i can answer that for oh it's anonymous i don't know who asked that so if i just go back to the institute's website again share this with the participants there you are um so for example uh last week we had an amazing two-day conference um not in our ccls building but in the honorable society of lincoln's inn and um we had a two-day program an amazing conference program i'll show you we had topics like artificial intelligence human genome editing film and fashion etc and the reason i'm showing you this is because this two-day conference was free for our llm students and uh it was amazing to see our students there um and in the in the closing ceremony i actually gave i gave uh quite an emotional speech and i said you know if you if you've been inspired by this this conference uh that's really important and that's the most valuable thing because the students are the you are the next generation of ip practitioners ip lawyers so if you've been inspired by hearing about artificial intelligence or all types of issues i've been talking about today then that's that's what makes it valuable um now another example uh to answer this question um if i can find it we basically had an amazing program well no i'll do i'll show you something different instead um we had an amazing uh project um at queen mary this is an article from today's financial times okay so a former ll.m student of mine who then became my phd student and now she is like an associate professor at another university in london this is from today's uh financial times and it's a profile of my student she's from ukraine this is her her name is olga and um if i scroll down the article she's making some proposals about the problems that uh there are with accessing medicines during the war in ukraine at the moment but it also says that she was um helping to run a project in ccls which was to establish a specialized ip court in ukraine and this was a big three-year project we had money from the uk government and we had llm students working on this project and what the llm students were doing was that they were preparing country specific reports to say in germany or in the united states or other countries this is how specialized ip courts work at present and what principles of best practice can we take when we propose an ip court in ukraine so that's the success story of an llm student who now has a profile in today's financial times um and uh started off working on some of our projects in the institute so back to you fabulous and the other just couple of questions you have are both module related so i'll ask the i'll answer and charlotte's question first and it's quite a quick one and so charlotte's asked when do you select um your modules so you would normally select your modules um during the welcome week when you start an induction and so that would be when you start with us in september um yeah and i'll add to that charlotte that um we we we help you or we try and help you who doesn't make it more confusing because during the welcome week i think i myself and all my colleagues i think we spoke at three or four different welcome events to different groups of students just for the ip specialism in which all the academics that have basically did what i did and say look this is what i teach on this module this is how we teach it we have small group uh you know discussions plus lectures etc um and then sometimes the students then get more confused because i think oh this sounds more interesting than i thought so my original plan is now changing so um the only problem is that it can sound too interesting and you then you know you're challenged about what to choose yeah i think actually the question that manchester has put in the q a is about what actually links with that duncan so she said that you know if is there a minimum number of modules that you can choose in one semester you know if you'd like one over the other there is and it's a good question mancha the problem is i can't remember what the number is so you'd have to check with the uh well charlotte can help maybe direct it to charlotte's colleagues of course um but absolutely it's a really good question because there is because otherwise you know we could have students who are just hanging about doing no modules in semester one and then realize that they have too much work in semester two so there is a minimum number but because i'm not involved in that side of the program i couldn't tell you what that number is that's still helpful i'm sure and i i know from a previous session that a similar question has been asked and someone said a similar thing that obviously we don't want to have um you're waiting around in semester if you're and not have anything to do um but also um just for you in terms of managing your time and it's better to have the modules spread out um so that um you're not overly pressured with uh modules in semester b for example and they have a really quiet time as we say um so also kind of study time too and i think i'm just reading now uh manchester's question um and uh refer specifically to you know being interested in modules since semester c um that's okay uh because as i explained all the modules in semester c are 15 credits so they don't take up too much of your total of 180 so um as long as you do that that minimum but also you know keep in mind that some of the modules in semesters a and semester b they're designed to like give you that solid foundation in the principles of ip law so that when you do those specialized modules in things like fashion and film or animal law you already know about the ip so there's also a logic for taking the earlier modules so that you're ready for the specialists uh learning in semester c and the other thing i'll say is that i'm impressed that no one asked me about the assessments yet because uh basically we have the different modules have different types of assessments so some of them are like an exam some of them are like essay assessment and some of them are even like uh group work and projects so it's worth checking in the handbook because we deliberately have a mix of different style of assessment because different students perform better and enjoy different types of assessment and basically there is a deadline for if it's like a written assessment like an essay which i think is probably the most common way that we assess with the llm for semester a there's a deadline in january to submit and for semester b there is a deadline in may uh i'm marking 150 assessments at the moment which they're good i'm enjoying reading them uh and then there'll be another deadline for some semesters three so we kind of um space out the assessment deadlines so you're not like under too much pressure doing everything at the last minute plus you get the written feedback on your assessment so you can actually improve uh and that's one of the the best things that i like to see is that i give students feedback from first semester and they take that advice and then the next assessment is better which is fantastic for the professors to see okay thank you and just a couple more questions we've had so um we've had a question about induction week um you will get information about that um over the next couple of months so and welcome week induction is used usually during during september and you'll get information on that if you've ever accepted your place and by then and you'll be able to and see all the uh information and events that's happening and book yourself onto that so look out in your inbox for that i answer the questions in the q a charlotte of course go ahead okay so i'll deal with um the last one first because it's about the dissertation so as i explained um and i think uh yashna probably understands already it's not compulsory to take a dissertation in this specialism um i think about to be honest i think about 70 of the students do take a dissertation but it's entirely up to you some students prefer to have on their cv you know all these expertise in different modules um and some of them want to do like in-depth research project so to answer the question what semester do we take up the dissertation you uh having like an induction week uh like specified that you are going to take the dissertation then the date around the middle of november you need to submit a title and an abstract for your proposed dissertation you are then allocated a professor as your supervisor then in january you have your first meeting with your supervisor and you work out a plan for the dissertation in january um then you usually have like the second meeting maybe in may or june where you report on how how is the research going did you find the information you needed and then a third supervision meeting usually maybe in june or july to discuss the findings and the conclusions and the recommendations that you'll make in the dissertation and then the dissedation is submitted at a date which is usually maybe the second week in august in the year that you finish your studies so that's basically how it works from november and then january you start working and meeting with your supervisor oh and there's another question about about money good question anonymous uh um yeah the example that i used about the ukraine court project yes the students were paid for research assistance so we don't expect students to work for free um and um but it depends on uh it's not like we have uh positions available all the time it depends on you know when we get requests like from uk government to undertake a study then we uh identify research assistants and uh by the way we always advertise that through the emails so it's very like fair and open application procedure so we don't just choose like cherry picker student there's always an opportunity for all students who are interested to apply for these positions thank you duncan that's great um i think we just got one more question um which is from charlotte in the chat just saying um if part-time students have the same level of access to extracurricular like um q legal and as far as i'm aware yes um there's no reason why if you're a part-time student you can't access these um these programs and still take part and just because you're doing it over two-year doesn't mean that you get less access to extra-curricular stuff so please don't worry about that yeah i i'd second that shot that uh uh part-time students are not in any way disadvantaged in learning activities or in the extracurricular activities and you know sometimes it's very nice to have part-time students because they have work experience etc as well so you know it's uh useful to have these skills available to us thank you um and the other the other questions from the chat charlotte have we dealt with those yes we've done those ones uh i i don't know when induction week is but so what i've done it will be the two weeks before the term starts so whenever we start it's before don't worry we're all covered there okay so i think i'll probably wrap it up there if that's okay and if you've got i think there's one more question in the q a which is um that's quite specific um so i may ask you if you um get in touch directly if that's okay um i'll just send you my email address on there and you're welcome to get in touch already i'm just conscious of time so um i'll send you that there yeah oh yeah this is the question which which has just been related about the how long do you have to write your essays yes it's actually it's much longer it's longer than a month i mean i can i can tell you what i do uh i give the students like a list of five or six essay topics uh in the in the first first week of the semester so that when you're attending the classes you've already got in your mind okay this this isn't this is useful point because i could include this in my essay um and then the essay deadline as i indicated is sort of after the end of that semester so in my example you would have more than 12 weeks because you'd know what the essay titles are before you start the module the module is 11 weeks and then you would have maybe another like a few weeks after that to submit so um it's not uh like a short-term deadline like a month that was suggested thank you duncan um and that's the last question so we'll wrap up here so thank you everyone and for joining today uh duncan thank you very much for your time and the informative toasted lecture um if anyone has any questions please feel free and to get in touch and there is a number of taste lectures taken and placed throughout june so please keep an eye on our website and um on and on your inboxes i'm sure you'll get um more uh sessions coming through that you can book onto um so thank you very much um and thank you everyone for your uh thanks in the chat just now um i will send a recording out of this session so um if you want to catch up on it you can um watch it again or have an empty information you can engage that as well so thank you everyone have a lovely day um and we hope to see you in september thank you everyone bye