Do You Need a Patent Attorney?
Yes. Count on it. If you think it’s expensive to use a patent attorney, see what it costs you if you don’t hire one and mess up your patent. While it’s perfectly legal for you to draft and prosecute your own patents (i.e., working pro se), I strongly recommend that you hire patent counsel for all patent work except design patents.
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Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) is a nonprofit association that serves the owners of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Founded in 1972 and based in Washington, D.C., it has a diverse membership: more than a hundred Fortune 500 member companies, including GE, 3M, IBM, AT&T, and PPG Industries, as well as several hundred independent inventors and patent attorneys and a few universities. IPO’s National Inventor of the Year Award recognizes America’s most outstanding inventors. Winners epitomize the American tradition of technological leadership and “Yankee ingenuity.” For information and a membership application, call 202-466-2396, e-mail [email protected], or visit www.ipo.org.
Time after time, without equivocation, the value of my patents has been enhanced by the contribution of a savvy patent attorney, someone who knows how to define invention and navigate the waters of prior art. The fact is, anyone can get a patent on almost anything. What good patent counsel will do is increase the odds that a patent awarded adequately protects your invention.
“Patent writing should be done by those specifically skilled in the art,” says Tomima Edmark, inventor of Topsy Tail, the invention that turned a ponytail inside out and made over $80 million in worldwide sales. “Writing your own patent application is a big mistake.”
Calvin D. MacCracken, who holds 80 U.S. patents and 250 foreign patents, advises in his Handbook for Inventors, “Writing your own patent is long, hard work …. If you can somehow afford a good patent attorney to do the whole job, that may well produce a better patent ….”
(Note: I’m referring to utility patents here. For advice on design patents, please refer to Chapter 14. I don’t recommend patent counsel for design patents, nor spending money on a search of prior art. Plant patents are covered in Chapter 15.)
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To find a patent attorney or patent agent licensed to practice before the USPTO, go to https://oedci.uspto.gov/OEDCI/GeoRegion.jsp. Currently, the USPTO recognizes 9,339 active agents and 28,933 active attorneys. Information concerning a practitioner’s status as an attorney is based on records provided to the USPTO’s Office of Enrollment and Discipline and might not reflect the practitioner’s status in a State Bar. If you’re interested in a practitioner’s status in a State Bar, contact that State Bar for specific information.
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