Tag: Patent Prosecution
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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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Stop Patenting Your Invention. Start Patenting Your Competitor’s Product.
You spent $50,000 describing what you built. Your competitor read it, built something different, and kept competing. You filed a patent on your product. The claims describe exactly what you built — your architecture, your…
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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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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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Assignment Due Diligence: Unassigned Assets
Spotting bad behavior in startup companies. It is heartbreaking to see bad behavior by ‘inventors’ and their startup companies, but it occurs over and over again. Let this lesson be an example of the things…
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Patent Attorneys Do Not Live with Their Mistakes
The Feedback Problem in Patent Law. Patent attorneys typically have zero feedback about the quality of their work product. This is an inherent weakness of the whole patent system. The attorneys do not have to…
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Every Word Hurts You: Patent Claims
Every Word in the Description Hurts You, and the Claims Hurt You, Too. The length of the claims really matters. The length of the specification is important – but only up to a point. There…
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Avoid Wishful Thinking Patents
I just want “protection,” but I have a run-of-the-mill product. Most startup CEOs want patents because they want ‘protection,’ so they go to a patent attorney. And the patent attorney is in the unfortunate situation…