Acquiring and asserting patents is expensive, but it is much more expensive than it needs to be. This is due to three primary inefficiencies in the overall patent ecosystem:
Primary Inefficiency #1: Poor Patent Quality
Poor quality of patent application preparation and/or prosecution result in billions of dollars wasted annually on filing and prosecuting patent applications that never issue. It’s estimated that about 40% of U.S. patent applications filed, never issue based on USPTO filing, issuance, and abandonment data. In 2025, over six-hundred and seventy thousand patent applications were filed with the USPTO, which means that about six-hundred and seventy thousand of them will never be issued. That adds up to about $6.8B spent on patent applications that won’t issue (assuming $25K spent per patent application).
Many poorly prepared and/or prosecuted patent applications will issue with claims that are essentially useless. In an ad hoc survey of thirty patent attorneys, it’s estimated that about 35% to 50% of issued patents are of such poor quality, they are useless.
Many more poor quality patents are not useless, but have moderate to severe ambiguity and/or lack of clarity in their claims. These types of patents dramatically increase legal fees to litigate and/or license them. No entity will pay top dollar for a patent license if it’s unclear what the patent is claiming. Only attorneys win in this case, which makes no one but them happy.
Primary Inefficiency #2: Poor Patent Planning
Poor planning regarding what inventions to patent protect, where to protect them, when to protect them, and how to protect them, leads to unnecessarily weakened patent portfolios. For too many small companies, they don’t patent enough to protect their technology, leaving it vulnerable for others’ to use with little recourse. For many large companies, they create patent portfolios with gaps and imbalance. As is often the case, they have too many patents in some areas, too few patents in other areas, and too many patents that don’t fit anywhere.
Primary Inefficiency #3: Hourly Rates
“Why bill ten hours when you can bill twenty?” “Why have one attorney working on something, when you can have two or three?” These are my biased impressions of large patent preparation and prosecution firms’ billing philosophies. The tasks for preparing a patent application and prosecuting them are well defined and the time it takes to execute each task is readily discernible. Too often I hear of a small company that was billed $50K to $75K for preparing and filing a patent application. Our flat fee for a complex invention is around $16K. Be wary of hourly rate fees.
**Please note that this article is not legal advice; it is not a legal opinion; nor should you rely on it as legal advice or as a legal opinion. This article merely expresses the author’s general thoughts on a topic regarding the business of patents. Nothing in this article establishes any form of an attorney-client relationship between you, the reader, and the author of this article.
