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 got it.” The attorney asked the right questions, followed the logic, saw the connections. The engineer has never felt so understood.
You are happy. The attorney is doing a good job. The relationship is working.
Except you have no idea whether the patents are any good. And neither does your engineer. What you both know — the only thing either of you can evaluate — is how the meeting felt.
That feeling is the most dangerous thing in your patent portfolio.
How the Bond Forms
Most inventors have spent months — sometimes years — working on a problem nobody around them fully grasps. Their manager gets the business case but not the technical insight. Their colleagues understand pieces but not the whole. Their spouse nods politely.
The disclosure meeting is often the first time anyone has truly listened.
A skilled patent attorney who asks the right questions — who digs into the mechanism, follows the logic, sees the connections the inventor sees — creates an experience the inventor has never had. The inventor feels understood. Not at the surface level. At the level of the idea itself.
The attorney looked into the soul of the invention and got it.
That experience creates loyalty that is deep, immediate, and often permanent. The inventor will go to bat for that attorney, recommend them to colleagues, follow their guidance without question — sometimes for years, sometimes for a career.
The attorney may not even remember the inventor’s name.1
That asymmetry matters. The attorney has done hundreds of these meetings. The inventor may do one or two in a lifetime. The emotional weight is not the same — and the loyalty it produces is not calibrated to competence. It is calibrated to the feeling of being understood.
What the Inventor Cannot See
Inventors cannot evaluate patent quality. They do not know what good claims look like. They cannot read a file history and see the damage. They cannot distinguish a patent that creates competitive leverage from a patent that hangs on a wall.
That is not their job. They are engineers and founders. They build things.
What they can evaluate is how they feel — and how they feel drives every assessment they make about their attorney.
If the attorney makes them feel comfortable, safe, and understood, the attorney is “great.” Full stop. The claim architecture, the detectability, the design-around resistance, the continuation strategy — all invisible. All irrelevant to the inventor’s assessment.
This is not unique to patent law. Medical malpractice claims spike not when the doctor makes a technical error, but when they fail to communicate. A surgeon who botches a procedure but communicates well gets forgiven. A surgeon who performs flawlessly but is cold gets sued. The patient cannot evaluate the surgery. They can evaluate how they were treated.
People remember how you made them feel.
Patent attorneys operate in the same dynamic — but the stakes are higher, because the inventor brought something sacred into the room.
Julie
I was on a diligence call where an entrepreneur was telling everyone how wonderful her patent attorney was. She referred to her by first name — “Julie” — with genuine warmth.
I reviewed the work product.
It was bad.
I explained what was wrong. The entrepreneur was disheartened. She asked who would be a good alternative.
“Anyone not named Julie.”
That sounds glib. It is not.
Julie was responsive. Julie explained things. Julie made the entrepreneur feel like her inventions mattered. Julie produced patents that would not survive a serious challenge. The entrepreneur could not see the gap because the relationship filled it.2
This is the “being heard” dynamic in its most dangerous form. The bond that makes the disclosure meeting work — the trust, the feeling of being understood, the permission to explore — is the same bond that prevents the inventor from questioning the output.
The better the meeting feels, the less likely the inventor is to scrutinize the result.
The Track One Story
I reviewed a portfolio where an attorney had filed four continuation applications — all on Track One prioritized examination — all with terminal disclaimers.
That is highway robbery.
The attorney did minimal additional work, put tens of thousands of dollars in his pocket, and saddled the inventor with four times the maintenance fees over the lifetime of the portfolio. The continuations added no strategic value. The terminal disclaimers meant they all expired on the same date as the parent. It was billing dressed up as strategy.3
I showed the inventor. I walked through the file histories. I explained what the terminal disclaimers meant. I showed the maintenance fee schedule.
The inventor would not tolerate me saying anything bad about his attorney.
The conversation was over.
Not because the evidence was unclear. Because the evidence threatened something the inventor needed — the belief that the one person who understood his invention had also protected it well.
Telling an inventor their attorney is bad is like telling someone their spouse is cheating. They will defend the relationship and resent the messenger. The information threatens something they need, and the need wins.
Why Evidence Does Not Work
You might think the solution is data. Show the inventor a better patent next to their patent. Walk them through the file history line by line. Explain the technical deficiencies.
None of it works.
Not even patent attorneys can reliably distinguish a good patent from a bad one by visual comparison. The inventor — who has no patent expertise at all — processes rational information through an emotional filter that rejects it.
The inventor who questions their patent attorney is questioning the one person who “got” their invention.
That is too threatening.
It is easier to defend the attorney than to face the possibility that the person who understood you best also failed you.
The parallels to other loyalty dynamics are uncomfortable but real. The emotional need being met is so deep that questioning the source means questioning the safety itself. The inventor does not defend the attorney because the evidence supports it. The inventor defends the attorney because the alternative — that the person who truly understood the invention also wasted $100,000 of the company’s money — is unbearable.4
What Actually Breaks the Bond
Almost nothing breaks the bond from the outside. What breaks it is consequences — and consequences arrive after the damage is done.
Litigation failure. The inventor attempts to enforce the patent and discovers, in a courtroom, that the claims describe their own product, not the competitor’s. The claims are too narrow. The detectability was never considered. The design-around was obvious. Litigation is the one environment where patent quality cannot be faked. Opposing counsel will find every weakness.
The inventor from the Track One story eventually came around. Not because I showed him the file histories. Not because I explained the terminal disclaimers. He came around after he tried to enforce the patents and was losing at every turn. The courtroom forced reality through the emotional filter. But by then — years later — the money was spent, the patents were prosecuted, and the strategic window had closed.
Financial gatekeeping. IP due diligence for a loan, an acquisition, or an investment round. The inventor will dismiss a consultant who says “your patents are weak.” They will not dismiss a lender who says “we cannot underwrite this portfolio.” The difference is not the message. It is the consequence.
Time and distance. The attorney retires or loses interest. The inventor changes companies. With distance, the emotional need fades and the inventor sees the portfolio with fresh eyes — sometimes years later.
Every one of these paths arrives too late. The patents are filed. The money is spent. The strategic window is closed.5
You Cannot Solve This by Hiring a Better Attorney
A better attorney will produce a better meeting — and a stronger bond.
The inventor will feel even more understood, and will scrutinize the output even less.
The problem is not the attorney’s skill. The problem is that the inventor evaluates the relationship and the company needs someone evaluating the output. Those are two different functions, and the inventor cannot perform both.
An inventor who feels heard — truly heard, at the level of the idea itself — craves that feeling. It overwhelms everything else. The claim architecture, the competitive positioning, the prosecution strategy — invisible behind the warmth of being understood.
Almost no patent attorney appreciates the weapon they are wielding. They were trained to draft claims, not to manage inventor psychology.
They do not know what it is like to bring your invention to the altar of a patent attorney as a sacrifice of your entire existence as an engineer.
The Structure That Prevents It
The bond must be prevented from becoming the quality signal — because once it forms, it cannot be overridden by evidence.
A Chief IP Officer creates that structure. The CIPO conducts the first disclosure meeting — CIPO and inventor, no attorney. That is where the inventor should feel heard. The CIPO has the technical expertise to understand the invention at a deep level and the mandate to expand it. The inventor’s primary bond forms with someone inside the company, someone whose incentives align with the business.6
When the attorney enters in the second meeting, the strategic direction is already set. The vocabulary is established. The attorney’s role is drafting, not relationship-building. The dangerous version of the bond — where the inventor’s loyalty to the attorney overrides quality assessment — has less room to form because the inventor’s primary relationship is with the CIPO, not outside counsel.
The CIPO evaluates the output independently of the relationship. They review draft applications before filing. They evaluate prosecution amendments for commercial impact. They catch the mistakes while they can still be fixed — not five years later when the patent is worthless and the money is gone.7
Because the inventor will defend their attorney to the death. Not because they are stupid. Because they are human. The need to be heard is real. The bond is real.
The quality of the patents is a separate question entirely — and the inventor has no tools to answer it.
The Test
Think about your lead engineer’s relationship with your patent attorney. Then ask yourself two questions:
Can your engineer explain what competitor product the patent would stop?
Has anyone other than the attorney evaluated whether the patents are commercially enforceable?
If the honest answer to both is no — if the only evidence that the patents are good is that the inventor feels good about the attorney — then the bond is doing its work. The relationship is filling the gap where quality evaluation should be.
Your inventor loves your patent attorney. That feeling is real. It is also the reason nobody is checking whether the patents are worth what you paid for them.
1 The emotional asymmetry of the disclosure meeting — and why inventor loyalty is calibrated to the feeling of being understood rather than the quality of the output — is explored in Quirks of the Attorney/Client Relationship in Investing in Patents.
2 The structural dynamics that prevent attorneys from self-reporting quality issues — including how billing incentives and liability concerns shape client communication — are covered in Quirks of the Attorney/Client Relationship in Investing in Patents. See also Your Patent Attorney Is NOT Giving Business Advice.
3 Terminal disclaimers often signal that the claims were not well-differentiated in the first place — the attorney wrote overlapping claims instead of focused claims on distinct inventions. See The URGENT Email From Your Patent Attorney for more on terminal disclaimers as a signal of poor upstream strategy.
4 The zero-feedback problem — how patent quality remains invisible for years because the system has no mechanism to evaluate outcomes until litigation or licensing forces scrutiny — is covered in The Ugly Truth — Most Patents Are Worthless in Investing in Patents. See also Your Patent Attorney Makes More Money When the Patent Application Is Bad.
5 The cost of delayed quality discovery — and why every path to breaking the inventor-attorney bond arrives after the money is spent and the strategic window has closed — is covered in Characteristics of Patents for Designing Good Business Assets in Investing in Patents.
6 The two-meeting disclosure structure — first meeting with the CIPO, second meeting with outside counsel — is described in detail in The Invention Disclosure Meeting Is Where Patent Value Is Decided.
7 The outside counsel management system — including quality review, prosecution oversight, and the feedback loop that the unmonitored system lacks — is covered in Managing the Process in Investing in Patents.