Patents Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota

How do Patent Prosecution Services Vary in Value?

More In This Category

View Transcript

How can there be or why is there a lot of variation in patent prosecution services and essentially the value of those services? And the answer to that is there’s a wide range of patent prosecution services that meet the minimum threshold to qualify as being quality work and, therefore, being essentially up to the standards of trade. Many applicants do not understand this, however. They think that a patent is a patent and that if an attorney gets a patent to draft, nine out of ten attorneys are gonna draft the same patent or prosecute the patent in the same way.

Truth be told is that one attorney may put in much less effort and get a patent issued that on its face appears to an inventor to be a good patent, but in fact the attorney has gotten far less coverage for that invention than the inventor was entitled to. So there can be a huge fluctuation in the value of the patent just based on the prosecution services, all levels of which would meet the minimum standards of the trade and also would appear oftentimes to the inventor to all be equally good effort. In fact, it’s sometimes possible that a very high quality patent may appear to be poorly drafted to the uninitiated inventor, who’s looking for the exact same wording that the inventor may use to describe his new technology, which may not be the best vocabulary to use to get a very valuable patent.

Minneapolis patent attorney Steve Lundberg, founding shareholder of Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner explains how even though a patent lawyer may write a patent that meets the minimum standard to be accepted by the USPTO, the actual coverage and protection can vary widely.

More Videos From This Lawyer