Patricia Akester holds a law degree (Catholic University of Lisbon, 1994), an LLM in Intellectual Property Law (University College London, 1997) and a PhD in Copyright and the Challenges of Digital Technology (Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, 2002).

She was registered with Lincolns Inn, Bar Association of England and Wales, as a Registered European Lawyer between 2009 and 2020 and has been registered with the Portuguese Bar Association since 1996. In the international arena, she has provided legal support to various entities, such as UNESCO (Paris), the Aga Khan Development Network (Paris, Lisbon), the Movie Pictures Association of America (California) and Anne Frank Fonds (Basel). In Portugal, she was Of Counsel with Sérvulo & Associates between 2012 and beginning of 2019, where she founded, in 2015, an Intellectual Property Clinic aiming to provide legal support for high tech companies. In February 2019 she set up an Legal Consultancy Office exclusively focused on Copyright Law, Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights.

She has been an associate with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, University of Cambridge, since 2012, where she devoted herself solely to research and teaching between 2002 and 2012. She is co-editor of the Portuguese-Brazilian side of a copyright research project on the Primary Sources on Copyright.

She has written various books and articles in the field, has presented papers in seminars and conferences around the world and has been a Sterling on World Copyright Law (London, Sweet & Maxwell, 1998) contributor since 2009. In Portuguese she has published, inter alia, Copyright Law in Portugal, Portuguese-speaking African Countries, EU and International Treaties (Coimbra, Almedina, 2013) and Annotated Portuguese Copyright Law Code (Coimbra, Almedina, 2017). A second edition of her Annotated Portuguese Copyright Law Code was published in November 2019.

She has been a columnist with Diário de Notícias (a daily "newspaper of record" established in 1864) since 2019, contributing regularly with articles of opinion on various issues, including Copyright Law, Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights.

She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Portuguese Bar Association Journal (since 2020), a member of the European Copyright and Design Reports (since 2020) and Vice President of the Portuguese chapter of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, founded in  Paris in 1878 by Victor Hugo (since 2023).

She was awarded the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship by the the Leverhulme Trust, in  May 2006 and the Pro-Author's Prize by Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores (SPA), which was set up in 1925 to manage the rights of authors, in May 2019.