The old adage, “You Get What You Paid For” doesn’t hold true for patents. The amount of money one spends to file, prosecute, and ultimately issue a patent does not correlate to patent quality. Patent quality is strictly a function of the skill and knowledge of the patent attorney who prepares and prosecutes the patent.
I believe it takes a patent attorney at least one hundred patents and about five years of full-time practice to acquire sufficient skills and knowledge to consistently prepare and prosecute quality patent applications. For me, training patent attorneys to do quality work is time-consuming and is not cost effective for years. The payoff comes when I can trust the attorney to consistently do quality patent work.
Unfortunately, most patent attorneys don’t get that level of training. Compounding the quality issue is that most patents are written by patent attorneys with less than five years of experience. This is especially true at larger law firms due to their hourly billing structure, multiple layers of partners, multiple layers of associates, and substantial overhead.
This results in a large number of issued patents that are of such poor quality, they are useless. What makes this even worse is that a patent holder most often doesn’t know that its patent is useless until the patent is needed years later. By then, it’s far too late to fix it.
So, I suggest you know who is really doing your patent work, especially at larger firms. What training have they received and/or are they receiving? How many years of experience do they have? How many patent applications have they filed and prosecuted?
One more point: If you are not talking directly to the patent attorney doing the work, that’s a problem. It’s hard enough to understand the complex nature of an invention when it comes firsthand.
Patents can be a very valuable and powerful tool for your business, but only if they are done properly. There’s too much at stake to not take more interest in the quality of your patent work. You owe it to yourself, your company, and your investors.
*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.
