Where Patent Value is Decided: The Invention Disclosure Meeting
Not filing. Not prosecution. Not litigation. The hour before drafting begins determines whether the patent will ever matter.
The single most important event in the life of a patent is not filing. It is not prosecution. It is not litigation.
It is the invention disclosure meeting.
Most companies treat that meeting as procedural — a technical download before the attorney starts writing. In reality, that hour determines whether the patent will ever have real economic leverage.
If the disclosure meeting is handled poorly, the patent will reflect ego, fear, and bias. If it is handled correctly, it will reflect strategy.
That difference is decided before the first word of the application is written.
And it has very little to do with technology.
The Default Model Is Broken
Here is how most disclosure meetings work.
The inventor sits down with the patent attorney. The inventor describes what they built. The architecture. The data flow. The algorithm. The specific implementation decisions they are proud of.
The attorney listens, takes notes, and drafts claims that describe what was just explained.
Two people in the room. One is emotionally invested in the invention. The other is economically invested in the relationship.
Nobody in that room is asking the business questions: what does the competitor’s product look like? What is the business case for this patent? What would a competitor need to copy in order to compete — and can we block that? Should we even file this patent at all?
Filing a patent is a capital allocation decision.1 It is a $30,000–$56,000 investment with 20-year consequences. But in the default model, that decision is made by an inventor who is emotionally attached and an attorney who is economically incentivized to file. No one with business judgment is in the room.
The result is predictable. The patent describes the company’s own product. It issues. The plaque goes on the wall. And the patent is commercially useless, because the competitor built something functionally equivalent but structurally different — and the claims do not touch them.
This is the most common and most expensive mistake in patent drafting. And it is built into the process.
The Inventor Walks In With More Than an Idea
When an inventor walks into a disclosure meeting, they are not just bringing a diagram. They are bringing identity, fear, hope, and bias. If those forces are not managed, the patent will reflect emotional distortion instead of strategic clarity.
Identity. For many engineers and founders, the invention is proof of competence. It demonstrates that they saw something others missed. Being listed as an inventor is status — it affects reputation, bonuses, resumes. They will mention the number of patents at your funeral.
So when someone asks whether a particular feature is essential, or whether a competitor might implement the idea differently, the inventor does not hear claim optimization. They hear criticism. They hear: “I am not special.” Identity threat produces defensiveness, over-explanation, and attachment to specific implementation details. The patent begins to narrow around ego rather than strategy.
Fear. Many inventors walk into the room with a quiet suspicion that the idea might be thinner than they want it to be. It sounded compelling in a pitch deck. It worked in a prototype. But what happens if we really tear it apart? What if the invention is incremental, easily designed around, or commercially irrelevant?
That possibility is terrifying. It is much safer to stay at the surface — to keep the discussion at a level where the idea feels strong and intact. So inventors resist deeper probing. They redirect. They defend. Because digging deeper risks revealing that the emperor has no clothes.
Hope. If fear is the quiet suspicion that the emperor has no clothes, hope is the opposite distortion. Hope says: we are already dressed for the parade. The product works. The demo was compelling. A few customers were enthusiastic. From there, it is a short step to assuming the outcome. “This will define the category.” “Competitors will not be able to avoid this.”
Hope creates complacency. If success feels inevitable, why stress-test the idea? Why spend an uncomfortable hour asking how competitors might design around it? Unchecked hope keeps the conversation at the surface and substitutes narrative for analysis.
Bias. Inventors are intelligent people. That does not make them immune to bias — it often makes bias more articulate. Confirmation bias leads them to selectively gather feedback that supports the invention’s importance. The endowment effect causes them to overvalue what they created. The sunk cost fallacy reinforces the belief that the invention must be valuable because so much was invested in building it. Optimism bias causes them to underestimate how easily competitors can design around the claims.
None of this is malicious. It is human. But if these forces are not surfaced during the disclosure meeting, they will shape the patent in subtle and damaging ways.
Myopia: You Are Describing the Wrong Product
The most dangerous sentence in a disclosure meeting is:
“Nobody would do it any other way.”
That sentence sounds confident. It sounds like expertise. It is usually myopia.
Inventors spend months — sometimes years — refining a product. They optimize it. They work through constraints. They eliminate alternatives. By the time the disclosure meeting happens, the implementation feels inevitable.
It is not inevitable. It is simply familiar.
Here is the hard truth: a valuable patent does not read on your product. It reads on your competitor’s product.
If your claims are tailored around what you happened to build, you are protecting your version of the solution. Your competitor will not build your version. They will build something close enough to compete — but far enough away to avoid infringement.
Myopia is the convergence of ego, fear, hope, and bias. Together, they produce a dangerous illusion: that your implementation is the center of the universe.
The market does not care how cleverly you solved the problem. The market cares whether competitors can solve the problem differently.
Your competitor may optimize for cost instead of performance. They may target a different segment. They may remove features you think are essential. They may attack the problem from the bottom of the market instead of the top.
If your patent does not anticipate that, it will not matter.
The Attorney Cannot Fix This
There is a comforting myth that the patent attorney in the disclosure meeting is a neutral, objective strategist.
That is rarely true.
The inventor is the client. The attorney works for the client. If the inventor insists on a particular direction, the attorney follows it. Not 51% of the time. One hundred percent of the time.
If the inventor says “don’t question that,” the attorney stops questioning. If the inventor says “that feature is essential,” the attorney includes it. If the inventor says “we already thought of everything,” the attorney drafts accordingly.
Because the inventor can send one email to the CEO saying the attorney was “difficult,” and the attorney is gone. Outside counsel survives on relationships.2 They do not survive on theoretical enforcement value fifteen years from now.
So what happens? Predictable behavior. The attorney sends drafts. The inventor rewrites sections. The attorney mechanically incorporates the changes. Language is copied directly from emails. The patent becomes a transcription exercise — technically detailed, strategically thin.
The attorney knows the application is not optimally structured. They know the claims are narrower than they should be. But the inventor insisted. So the attorney drafts what the inventor demanded.
This is not incompetence. It is the structural reality of outside counsel. When the inventor will not tolerate rigorous analysis, the patent will not contain it.
The most valuable patents come from the most uncomfortable meetings — sessions where the invention is stress-tested, alternatives are explored, and ego is managed but not indulged. But that requires someone in the room who is not the inventor and not the attorney. Someone with patent drafting experience who understands claim scope and prosecution — but whose job is to make business decisions, not draft patents.
That is the role of a Chief IP Officer.
The CIPO bridges the gap between the board’s business objectives and the attorney’s technical execution. They have the patent experience to understand what makes a claim enforceable and the business judgment to decide whether the investment is worth making. They are not drafting. They are not prosecuting. They are governing the business decision that determines whether the patent will ever produce a return.
Because that is what a patent filing is: a business decision. Not a technical one.
Two Meetings, Not One
The fix is not a better disclosure meeting. It is splitting one meeting into two — with different people, different objectives, and different outcomes.
Meeting One: The Chief IP Officer Builds the Business Case
The first meeting does not include the patent attorney.
The CIPO runs this meeting. They have the patent drafting experience to understand claim scope, prosecution strategy, and enforceability — but their role is not to draft. Their role is to make the business decision: does this invention justify the investment?
The inventor presents what they built. The CIPO runs them through the hard questions — not to tear the invention apart, but to find where it is strong.
Separate the product from the principle. Move the conversation from “this is what we built” to “what problem does this solve?” Abstraction begins. Attachment weakens. The invention starts to emerge from behind the implementation.
Force design-around thinking. “If you were your competitor, how would you avoid paying yourself?” This exposes blind spots without humiliation. The inventor starts seeing the invention through the competitor’s eyes3 — often for the first time.
Identify the irreducible core. What must a competitor copy in order to compete effectively? Not what you happen to have built. What they cannot avoid. That is where the patent’s value lives.
Anchor everything to revenue. Not “is this clever?” but “if they copied everything except this feature, would it hurt your revenue?” That question eliminates lottery-ticket thinking quickly. It also kills patents that should not be filed — which saves the full lifecycle cost and keeps the trade secret off the public record.
Evaluate whether to file at all. This is the most important business decision in the entire process — and it is the one the attorney cannot make. The single highest-value activity in patent management is saying no to a bad invention before any money is spent. Every invention you decline to patent saves $30,000–$56,000 in lifecycle costs and keeps your trade secrets off the public record. A healthy pass rate is 20–40%. If you are filing everything your attorney recommends, the evaluation is not working — because the attorney is not in a position to say no.
Look beyond patents. Is this better protected as a trade secret? Is there a trademark to register? A copyright to secure? Patents are the centerpiece, but they are not the whole picture. The business case considers the full IP position.
The inventor walks out of this meeting calmer, clearer, and more strategic. The emotional dynamics — identity, fear, hope, bias — have been managed. The invention has been tested against real competitive pressure. And the outcome is a concrete business recommendation: invest, defer, or pass — with a written rationale tied to your business strategy.
Your board gets the data to decide. Not the attorney’s recommendation to file. Not the inventor’s enthusiasm. A business case.
If the answer is invest, the output is a prosecution playbook.
The Prosecution Playbook
The playbook is a written document — produced before the attorney drafts a single claim — that contains:
- Named target competitors — the specific companies whose products the claims should read on
- Claim architecture — the structure and scope of the independent claims, aimed at the competitor’s product, not the inventor’s
- Design-around analysis — the ways a competitor might try to avoid the claims, and how the claims should anticipate those paths
- Continuation strategy — what the next filing in the family should cover, and why, before the first application is even drafted
- Detectability assessment — can infringement be detected from the outside, or does it require discovery? If it requires discovery, is the claim worth filing?
- Business rationale — the written justification for the investment, tied to revenue, competitive positioning, or deployment strategy
This is the document that transforms patent drafting from guesswork into execution.
Meeting Two: The CIPO Briefs the Drafting Attorney
The second meeting is the attorney briefing. The CIPO hands the patent attorney the prosecution playbook — and for the first time in their career, they get clear instructions before they write a single word.
The attorney knows:
- Which competitors the claims should target
- What the claim architecture should look like
- What design-arounds to anticipate
- What the continuation strategy is
- What the business rationale is
They do not have to guess. They do not have to extract strategy from a rambling technical narrative. They do not have to navigate the inventor’s ego while simultaneously trying to think about claim scope.
The inventor is in this meeting too — their technical knowledge is essential. But the emotional dynamics have already been managed in Meeting One. The business case is settled. The board has approved the investment. The inventor is no longer defending the invention. They are helping execute a business decision that has already been made.
This changes everything for the attorney.
The adversarial dynamic disappears. The attorney is no longer trying to push the inventor toward abstraction while worrying about the relationship. The CIPO has already done that work. The attorney has a playbook. They have targets. They have architecture. They can focus on what they are actually good at: drafting precise, enforceable claims.
Drafting is faster because the direction is clear. There are fewer rounds of revision because the scope was defined before drafting began. The back-and-forth that drives unnecessary attorney hours — “what did you mean by this?” “should the claims cover that?” “who are we targeting?” — is eliminated.
The attorney becomes what they should be: an enormously valuable execution layer. Not the strategist. Not the psychologist. Not the relationship manager navigating emotional landmines.
A skilled craftsman with clear instructions.
What This Produces
Better patents. Claims that read on the competitor’s product, not the inventor’s. Claims that anticipate design-arounds. Claims that are anchored to revenue and competitive positioning. Patents that change competitor behavior — which is the only test that matters.
Lower cost. Clear direction eliminates wasted drafting cycles. Pre-packaged invention disclosures minimize attorney time. The attorney is not billing hours figuring out what the patent should do. They know what it should do. They are executing.
Faster prosecution. When the claims are well-targeted from the start, prosecution goes faster. Fewer office action rejections. Fewer amendments that narrow the claims and destroy commercial value. The patent issues sooner, at lower total cost.
Fewer bad patents. The inventions that should not be patented are caught in Meeting One — before any money is spent. The trade secrets stay secret. The budget is preserved for patents that serve a real business purpose.
A better relationship with your attorney. This is the part nobody talks about. Patent attorneys do not enjoy the current model either. They do not enjoy guessing what the claims should target. They do not enjoy navigating inventor egos. They do not enjoy producing work product that they know is strategically thin because the inventor would not tolerate deeper questioning. Give them clear instructions and they will produce their best work. The relationship improves because the attorney is set up to succeed.
The Moment That Determines Twenty Years of Leverage
Drafting cannot fix a broken disclosure process.
If fear dominated the room, claims become bloated. If hope dominated, claims become inflated. If ego dominated, claims describe a product instead of a market position. If bias dominated, competitors are underestimated.
The patent application reflects whatever forces controlled the room.
The two-meeting structure solves this by separating the business decision from the technical execution. The CIPO runs Meeting One — managing the psychology, building the business case, and producing a prosecution playbook. Meeting Two hands that playbook to a skilled attorney who can execute with precision.
The question in Meeting One is not a technical question. It is a business question:
What must your competitor copy in order to compete?
If you can answer that clearly, the playbook writes itself. The attorney drafts with confidence. The patent has teeth.
If you cannot answer that clearly — if nobody in the room can shift the lens from “what we built” to “what they must build” — then the patent will describe your product, not your competitor’s.
Every patent is a business decision with 20-year consequences. It affects valuation, competitive positioning, licensing revenue, and exit options. That decision belongs at the board level — governed by someone with the patent experience to understand enforceability and the business judgment to decide whether the investment is worth making.
That is what the CIPO does. And the invention disclosure meeting is where it starts.
1 The economics of patent investment are covered in detail in Chapter 2 of Investing in Patents — including lifecycle costs, valuation methodology, and how to evaluate whether a patent justifies the capital.
2 The structural dynamics between inventors, CEOs, and outside counsel are explored in Chapter 4 of Investing in Patents. See also Your Patent Attorney Is NOT Giving Business Advice.
3 Actor analysis — determining who actually infringes a claim and whether infringement can be detected — is covered in Chapter 5 of Investing in Patents and in Actor Analysis for Patent Infringement.