Most patent attorneys including both patent practitioners that are in private practice and certainly patent practitioners that are in corporate practice recognize that there is just a certain minimum amount of time that an attorney has to spend on a patent application to even get something that is in a form sufficient to file with the US Patent and Trademark Office, and that would be called sort of like the very least amount you could possibly put into an application to get it filed. And that cost may be just hypothetically say, that might be $2,000.00 that you need to spend at least to get something that you could present to the Patent Office that will be accepted and prosecuted.

On the other hand, there’s also a number on the high end above which doesn’t matter how much more money you spend, you’re not going to get any appreciable increase in value. So that number might typically be for the routine corporate patent application maybe $15,000.00, above which, you could probably spend another 50 and really not improve the quality of the patent application simply because you’ve exhausted all the possibilities for getting the most coverage possible.

And in between, you know, that lowest amount and that cut off amount, say at $15,000.00, there’s a range of effort that can be made in between there and between a couple of different points in that continuum is where you typically find the best value for your money. Then it’s going to be probably a little bit less than the $15,000.00 but it’s not going to be a lot less than that, and you’re trying to find that number. And that number can be different for each different type of technology, for each different patent attorney. So that number will move around a little bit, but there is an optimum amount of effort to get the best value for your money.