Including the services of a patent attorney. Or, how difficult is it to apply for a patent without a patent attorney?
First, get “Patent It Yourself” by David Pressman. http://www.patentityourself.com/
That will get you an idea of how much it might cost. The cost depends on exactly what you want to patent. In any case, it will cost a minimum of several thousand dollars even if you don’t engage a patent agent.
It varies wildly depending on the type of patent being applied for, but most of them are in the range of a couple hundred bucks for the basic filing fee - and it just goes up and up from there. (of course, I’m assuming U.S. here)
Here at my company it seems to cost around $10,000 to $20,000 to get a patent written and filed by a law firm. I would imagine it would cost more for a person with little experience with what documentation is needed by the lawyer as they will need to spend more time writing the patent and consulting with you.
The filing fee is negligible compared to the cost of writing a patent.
In my experience, it’s between $5,000 and $20,000 if you use a patent attorney to turn your rough draft into a full application, and deal with any patent office actions along the way (which seem pretty much guaranteed to happen).
Plus, patenting the damn thing isn’t a sure thing. You can spend years and thousands and get nothing for it. I’m having to decide now whether to continue to go after it.
Wow. Thanks for the links and good info. That is more expensive than I even thought it would be. The “patent it yourself” idea might be my best bet.
You could probably save a lot if you were willing to write (and typeset) the entire thing yourself, fill out the forms, file it, etc. and just have a patent attorney just review everything. You might get by with just a few hours of attorney time ($150-$400/hr?) like that, at least until the first office action. That’s often 18+ months later, so that buys you some time to raise more money, or abandon it.
Even if it’s granted, you really have no idea how strong it is until it’s contested in court. A seasoned attorney can make an educated guess, especially if you pay even more big bucks to have them do a patent search.
Remember that all a patent really gives you is a good chance of winning a suit for infringement, which will cost a whole bunch more, and which still has a good chance of resulting in your patent being voided anyway. And that’s only for a temporary period which depends on the country. The government will do nothing to police against infringement, btw, you have to do that on your own via threatening lawyer letters and the courts.
If you’re willing to spend that money to have something to hang on your wall, go right ahead. If it’s a business decision, involving your own money, have a comprehensive and realistic business plan in mind for exploiting the invention and be completely hardheaded about pursuing it.
Also, stay away from the firms that advertise on cable about how they’ll market your invention to companies that might make you some money for it. That doesn’t work except in a very few cases in which the inventor knows the industry and the target companies and their needs very well, and therefore doesn’t need these guys anyway. They’ll take your money, give you a song and dance, mail copies to a few places, say they tried but the economy yada yada, and move on to the next sucker. If they help you get a patent, it might be a design patent instead of a utility (“real”) one, and those are useless - the cover the product’s appearance, not what it does.
It would be very helpful to read the book first, even if you plan on contacting a patent agent, because then you’ll be able to help him with the information he needs. Just walking in unprepared means he’ll spend hours dragging the basics out of you.
And the “we’ll help you with your invention!” ads you see on cable are pure scams.
And as Elvis says, all a patent gives you is the right to sue someone who infringes your patent. So before you even look into a patent for your invention, you should take a long hard look at the business plan for your invention. How are you going to make money on this invention? And if your invention won’t make money, what’s the purpose of the patent?
Are you seeing these? 20 years ago any patent application from me or someone in my group was guaranteed to get bounced back at least once. Five years ago I filed two patents, and never heard a peep. And I can say without false modesty that neither was exactly super-innovative or earth-shattering. Perhaps examiners are now actually trying to find prior art the way they used to.
In my experience, the $5,000-$20,000 figure people are throwing around is accurate even assuming people are basically writing all their own claims and providing their own drawings and schematics. You’re not going to rack up $20,000 in fees for typesetting and filling out forms, their time adds up when they “just review everything”.
For instance, I know a guy who just paid $35,000 to Duane Morris to file a business method patent for which he wrote all the claims. That’s just what he paid to file the patent - there’s been no prosecution yet. I think he got taken to the cleaners, but that’s beside the point.
Yes, remember that the estimates people have posted here are for obtaining a patent in the U.S. You’ll need to file in other countries you want patent protection in and each one will cost quite a bit of money.
There have been a lot of people saying that the entire patent system needs an overhaul, and one of the reasons often cited is that it is very difficult for an individual to patent anything. It costs a lot of money up front, and that money doesn’t necessarily buy you much. There are no patent police. If someone infringes on your patent, you aren’t automatically notified and nothing gets done unless you do something about it. It’s up to you to find out about the infringement and it is up to you to file a suit for it. Big companies with deep pockets have been known to sometimes take the tactic of trying to lawyer you to death in a patent dispute. Many individuals can’t afford the lawyer fees to deal with this and either give up or accept some kind of settlement for a fraction of what the patent is worth.
I’m not saying it is impossible for an individual to patent something, just warning that it can sometimes lead to a very difficult road ahead.
The inventor’s lot is not a happy one. A good friend had an ingenious idea years ago and tried to run with it. This was not some handy-dandy little household gizmo - it was a revolutionary idea for storage & handling of bulk materials (think grain elevators, mineral ores, plastic pellets etc.) It would cut the cost of building a new facility nearly in half and expedite the handling & loadout of materials over present systems. He had worked for years as a commission salesman for a large well-known company that built this sort of equipment; he knew the business, and this invention seemed like the real thing.
My friend played it smart…he got his preliminary desigh work and patent application in order before he showed the plans to anybody and tried to sell the idea. I believe he spent about $10,000 on the patent attorney and a like amount on the mechanical engineer who helped finalize the plans.
With plans & patent in hand, he went to the company he sold for, to ask if they’d help him develope it. Not interested…they were doing well with their own line of products, didn’t want to try anything new.
He went to the competition. They offered to buy out the patent and develope the concept themselves, for some laughably small sum - I think it was $5000 - and no royalties or anything. He refused of course, and they responded by leaking word to his company that he’d been dealing with a competitor, with the result that he lost his commission sales job. A third company that he approached tried to literally steal the idea, but he was able to put a stop to that.
He decided to develope it himself and sought help from some venture capitalists. Real barracudas, these guys. They’d back him IF he’d give them a lien on his home and property in case the project failed. If it flew, they’d get nearly all the profits…something like 99%, which would leave him with almost nothing, even if it was a success.
My friend finally sought to put together a consortium of small private investors. Last I heard, he had found a few but was still far short of having enough funds to even build a prototype, and he’s been at it for nearly ten years.
Bottom line? Innovaters and inventers hardly ever get rich. The smart creative ones like Nocola Tesla or Philo Farnsworth get relegated to a couple of paragraphs in the history books and die broke, while the credit and $$$ go to the moneychangers who did little more than write a check, often with other people’s money.
SS
One of the sneaky things you don’t often hear about is the Pastent Maintenance Fee. It used to be that, once you got you patent, you were home free for 17 years.
No more. Since about 1980 you have to pay Patent Maintenance Fees, or you lose the patent.
I get the impression that the Patent folks figure you must be making money on your patent, and they desrve some of that. So after 3.5 years, you have to pay an additional $980. After 7.5 years you pay $2480, and after 11.5 years you pay $4,110. (Under appropriate circumstances, you qualify as a “Small Entity”, and these fees are halved)
Failure to pay thes fees makes you lose your patent rights. Surprise!
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009september15.htm#maintain
Granted, this does tend to eliminate frivolus patents. The guys who patented the idea of using a laser pointer to play with your cat* failed to pay this fee, and the patent rights lapsed, so now anyone can sell a laser pointer and explicitly say that it’s for playing with your cat, and they can’t be sued.
*patent # 5,443,036, granted August 22, 1995 – Method of Exercising a Cat. I kid you not. I researched this one and wrote an article about it.
Most of the ones I’ve seen have had one, usually two office actions (over a couple of years at least). That may be from the strategy of starting with very broad claims, to see what the examiner will allow.
I agree, he probably did get taken to the cleaners. For the ones I’ve been involved in, we wrote the draft application, and draft figures. The attorneys reformatted it, and redrew the figures in the proper format, made some (minor) edits, and wrote the first draft of the claims. After a few edits back and forth, they filed it. Any prosecution also involved some back and forth, especially if the claims were modified. On a few of them, they did draw the figures from scratch for us.
Someone else mentioned reading some patent books, even if you use an attorney - that’s a good idea. The closer you can approach a final application yourself, the less you’ll have to pay an attorney to “fix” it for you.
You have to be very careful dealing with patent attorneys. It’s easy to rack up unexpected billable hours with innocent questions. If you ask an open-ended question that they’ll have to (or could plausibly decide to) research, make sure you put some bounds on how much time they should spend.
For maximum fun, you could follow the advice I’ve heard that calls for two sets of attorneys. One set writes and files your patents, and the other set does any prior art searches. You don’t want to taint your patent-writing attorneys (or yourself) with any prior art, so you need an independent set for that. Fortunately we’ve never followed that strategy.