Category: Working with Attorneys
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Your Inventor Loves Your Patent Attorney. That Is the Problem.
The bond that makes the disclosure meeting work is the same bond that makes quality invisible. Your lead engineer just came back from a meeting with your patent attorney. They are glowing. The attorney “really…
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Your Patent Attorney Makes More Money When the Patent Application Is Bad
The worse the initial filing, the more they bill to fix it. And nobody told you that up front. You got a quote for a patent application. Maybe $8,000. Maybe $12,000. It seemed reasonable. The…
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Your CTO Should Never Own Your Patent Strategy
When the CTO owns IP, you get more patents, not better patents. And that is the opposite of what matters. The most common pattern: the CEO delegates patent decisions to the CTO. The CTO talks…
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Just Do Your Job
Your patent attorney is a skilled professional. They spent years learning patent law. They passed the patent bar. They have written hundreds of applications and prosecuted thousands of office actions. And they will not make…
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Why Patent Competence Is a C-Suite Responsibility
Why outsourcing it to a patent attorney is one of the most common — and expensive — mistakes founders make There’s a simple test for whether a patent actually matters: Did it change your competitor’s…
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Are Patents Still Relevant in the Age of AI?
The cost to build software is collapsing. Not slowly. Not incrementally. It’s collapsing fast enough that entire assumptions about startups, competition, and defensibility no longer hold. AI has changed the economics of software development in…
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Stolen Valor: How Sleazy Patent Attorneys Abuse Inventorship
For an innovator, being named as an inventor on a patent is the crowning achievement of a career. Being named an inventor says that the person has contributed something to humanity that has never existed,…
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AI-Assisted Patent Search Tools Exacerbate Inventor Biases
AI chat tools have two problems: over-simplification and hallucination. These two problems mimic inventor’s biases when doing patent searches, leading to bad results. Inventors and entrepreneurs might love the idea of using an AI‑powered search…
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Your Patent Attorney Is NOT Giving Business Advice
Are you getting a list of options or a strategy that aligns with your business? Is that “strategy” more tailored to the Law Firm’s billing or your success? Most inventors think that hiring a patent…