Let’s say that your startup has steered clear of Invention Promotors and has realized the folly of trying to pursue a patent without the help of a competent patent attorney. Shouldn’t it try to keep costs down by hiring the lowest cost patent attorney available?
As with most things in life, you tend to get what you pay for. Low prices are rarely partnered with great quality and prompt service. Instead, cheap is often an investment in dissatisfaction.
In the patent world, the cheapest patents often contain only invalid claims and/or claims that don’t adequately protect against infringers.
Moreover, cheap patents often aren’t all that inexpensive. We’re talking many thousands of dollars just to prepare and submit the cheap application, many more thousands to convince (if you even can) the patent office to grant that cheap application as a patent, and yet many more thousands to keep the resulting cheap patent in force across the entirety of its available term. Clearly, cheap patents cost plenty.
So ask yourself this: does this innovation deserve to be “protected” by a cheap patent that wasn’t carefully crafted to do its job?
Keep in mind that patent attorneys who quote low-ball prices for preparing and submitting your patent application likely will not:
- Take the time to deeply understand your innovation, including how and why it arose;
- Commission a patentability search;
- Analyze the found prior art;
- Counsel your company on the best patenting strategies for its current and future business and legal needs;
- Write the application to include legally sufficient explanations, helpful examples, and alternative embodiments;
- Avoid risky language in the application (“patent profanity”) that “can and will be used against you”; and/or
- Craft the application’s claims to:
- Avoid the known prior art;
- Fully capture the patentable aspects of the innovation;
- Make detecting infringement easy;
- Target deep-pocketed infringers;
- Prevent easy design-arounds;
- Facilitate licensing in yours and other markets; and
- Maximize licensing royalties.
Once your patent application is submitted, patent attorneys who quote the cheapest rates or prices to prosecute that application likely won’t know how to, or won’t make sufficient efforts to:
- Counsel your company on the best prosecution strategies for its needs.
- Expedite your patent application through the USPTO;
- Leverage your application to improve the prosecution of related applications;
- Negotiate with the examiner to obtain the broadest valid claims;
- Appeal to overcome the rejections of a reluctant examiner;
- Avoid statements that could weaken the resulting patent; and/or
- Guide your company on the best licensing and enforcement strategies.
Of course, paying top dollar also doesn’t guarantee that your patent attorney will handle your application well.
For example, large law firms are notorious for not only charging exorbitant fees, but also handing off the patent preparation and prosecution work of startups and other small clients to very junior, inadequately trained, and barely supervised associates. Even worse, in many cases the client’s contact person, the profit-earning partner, hardly takes a moment to review (or demand improvement to) the quality of the inferior work performed by those associates on your behalf.
So what’s the solution?
Your company should strongly consider hiring a highly experienced and competent patent counsel who works solo or in a small firm that is dedicated to patent (and possibly other IP) work but avoids overhead expenses such as for posh office space. Still, such attorneys typically won’t have the cheapest rates, as they tend to stay in high demand. But their work will be much less expensive (and almost always of much, much better quality) than that obtained from the large law firms.