IPIC100 Legacy Series: E. Peter Johnson

In 1966, when Peter Johnson was admitted to practice before the Canadian and U.S. Patent Offices, he became the only patent lawyer in Edmonton. Alberta was still years away from the oil sands boom that would define its economy, and the legal infrastructure to protect the inventions coming out of that boom was just beginning to take shape. Johnson spent the next five decades building it, one patent at a time.

Born in Cartagena, Colombia, and raised partly in Bogotá before his family settled in Toronto when he was twelve, Johnson arrived at law by an unusual route. He earned a degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Alberta in 1956, then worked for four years as an engineer in the oil industry before deciding the law was where he belonged. He completed his law degree at the University of British Columbia in 1963 and was called to the Alberta Bar the following year. That professional engineering background became the foundation of everything that followed.

For decades Johnson practised with Ogilvie & Company, one of Canada's most respected patent firms, before joining Parlee McLaws LLP as counsel in 2001, where he helped grow the firm's intellectual property group into a highly regarded team. His name appears as attorney or agent on hundreds of patents, and the list reads almost like a history of Alberta industry itself. He worked on the hot water process and later the SAGD process that made oil sands extraction commercially viable. He prosecuted patents on pipeline repair systems, drilling tools, and downhole equipment, the unglamorous machinery that keeps an energy economy running. His clients included Alberta Energy Company, Petro-Canada, Esso Resources, Gulf Canada, and the provincial and federal governments, alongside the university researchers, small manufacturers, and individual inventors. Even as the technologies he helped to protect became increasingly advanced, Johnson himself remained staunchly analogue. To the end of his career, he drafted patent applications and responses to Office Actions by hand, eschewing the computer in favour of pen and paper.

His interests ranged further than oil and gas. Johnson prosecuted early patents on wind turbine design at a time when renewable energy was a fringe pursuit in Alberta rather than a growth sector. He handled carbohydrate chemistry developed by the noted researcher Raymond Lemieux, medical prosthetic technology, and grain handling equipment for the province's agricultural sector. The range reflected a practitioner who saw patent law less as a specialty than as a tool that belonged wherever Albertans were building something new.

Colleagues who worked alongside him describe a man who was exacting about the details of an invention almost to the point of exasperation, the kind of lawyer who would stop an inventor mid-sentence to ask what exactly they meant by a bolt and how it worked, because that question was often where the real invention was hiding. He demonstrated genuine enthusiasm for the inventions in front of him, and an unwavering dedication to the people behind them, whether that was a major energy company or an individual inventor with a single idea.

That rigour is, by nearly every account, indistinguishable from how he mentored. One former co-inventor recalled that Johnson was the one who first suggested he train as a patent agent, then later pushed him toward law school to widen his client base, effectively setting the course of the man's entire career. Others who came up under him tell a similar story: a lawyer generous with his time who trained agents for the same qualifying exams he had once been among the first in the province to sit, and whose pragmatic approach to the profession, as one Edmonton practitioner put it decades later, was something the whole local patent bar still measured itself against. The pattern holds across firms and generations. Lawyers who knew him at Ogilvie & Company and at Parlee McLaws alike describe the same mix of technical exactitude and patience with anyone still learning the trade. Every patent agent practising in the province today was trained by Peter, trained by someone he trained, or has worked alongside someone he influenced. His reputation within the patent bar rested not only on his technical expertise, but on a commitment to mentorship.

It was not unusual for Johnson to spend his weekends reading patent cases. While others might pack novels for a weekend at the lake, Johnson packed volumes of patent cases. He relished making sense of judicial reasoning and debating the implications of a decision. His training sessions with junior lawyers often involved excerpts from the latest cases, discussed with the same enthusiasm others reserved for their favourite books.

Johnson retired from Parlee McLaws in 2019, after more than fifty years in practice. The Intellectual Property Institute of Canada has named him to its IPIC 100 project, honouring the individuals who shaped the profession over the organization's first century, describing him not just as a practitioner but as a mentor and educator who influenced generations of patent agents and lawyers. He died on August 8, 2024, at the age of ninety.

Peter Johnson’s professional legacy lies in the hundreds of patents bearing his name as agent, in the practice group he helped build at Parlee McLaws, and above all, in the patent agents across Alberta who honour his teachings whenever they ask one more time how, exactly, the bolt works.