Many corporations have fixed budgets for drafting applications or filing amendments. And while this is very convenient for administrative purposes, it often can backfire and the reason it backfires is that in many cases as particularly a prosecution as patents mature and prosecution in it becomes more clear that a particular patent has less value than another patent you’re allocating more budget to the low value patents than you should and less money to the high-value patents than you should.

And you’re essentially expecting your patent attorneys to somehow reallocate that in terms of relative effort because they’re getting paid the same thing for every office action they reply to. But in reality there’s a very limited ability for attorneys to be able to take money off of one project where you don’t really need that much budget because it’s an easy job and move it to one where it should get more budget. So by having a very monolithic pricing structure you end up actually hurting yourself in the long run.