"Our marketing person sat in the room with engineers for 3 years. It's no wonder they can now emulate a team of engineers"

The amount by which engineering egos are inflated is amazing. Guess what - being a lawyer takes a bit more work than being on a legal case for three years. Why, as opposed to engineers, there's actually a bar they are held to.

Interestingly, sitting with lawyers 5 days a week for 3 years can earn you a JD degree and for many is sufficient preparation to pass the bar.

If your purpose is to pass the bar, you probably want to direct the topics of those 3 years of meeting with lawyers. If you want to specialize in patent law without concern for passing the bar, 3 years could be overkill. So you may only need to spend 1-2 days a week for 3 years meeting with patent lawyers.

Sure, but the claim here isn't that the person passed the bar or is a lawyer, just that they were able to produce a lawyer-like document requiring knowledge of one specific subset of the law that they happen to have had lots of exposure to in their regular job.

Sometimes marketing people that sit with the engineers actually learn to code. It has happened at my company. Do they have all the skills someone who got a CS degree would have? Maybe not. Do they have some subset of those skills necessary for the particular tasks the team is faced with daily at this company? Sure.

You can take the legal documentation from the previous patent battle to see how to frame arguments. It's not uncommon for intellectual property and patent attorneys to dabble in their area of expertise to better understand both the exceptions raised by experts and form arguments that experts understand. My wife asks for advice all the time on how to phrase key points because at the end of the day they are trying to make compelling arguments.

Do you really think it's impossible a founder and engineer who went through a three year battle over patents could form a similar document? You'd only have to understand the assertions and have an attorney review your work. There are tons of legal reviews which end up with only one person being listed while the others are not given attribution to the document.

I was about to comment something similar. I've myself worked with patent lawyers and can emulate their speech to some extent.