US Patent Practice Tips

Where to start?  With questions of course! Getting a good patent depends both on what is in the patent application and also how it is written.  Getting the what right might be obvious, but getting the how right can save not only headaches, but huge amounts of time and money.  So this space, which over the coming months will be devoted to suggestions and strategies for US patenting, will...

Note: Our second tip in a series. To view previous articles please click here. Patents are an invention of society . It goes like this: you have new technology, the public wants it, and to get you to tell us about it, society (through enacting laws) invented a time-limited monopoly that we call a patent! It sounds simple, except here’s the catch: because patents are society‘s invention,...

Note: Our third tip in a series. To view previous articles please click here. Do you own your patent? It might seem obvious, but this is not a trivial question. And I know there are far more interesting things to think about (believe me – there are more interesting things to write about!), but like the fine print in a contract, the most boring thing can lead to big problems if you don’t pay...

Note: Our fourth tip in a series. To view previous articles please click here. Every person or company with something to patent needs to be careful about damaging public disclosure (see Jeremy’s related tip here). A US provisional patent application (PPA) is one common way to establish a priority date for an invention before an intentional public disclosure, and to protect against the...

Note: Our fifth tip in a series. To view previous articles please click here. When I was a kid growing up in New York, I was fascinated by the pop-up timer that came in the turkeys we would cook for holiday meals.  Based on the simplest of principles, this little invention is supposed take the guesswork out of cooking by indicating when the turkey has cooked enough and is ready to come out of...

Note: Our sixth tip in a series. To view previous articles please click here. When meeting with inventors, one question that they often ask is “what will I have to disclose to the Patent Office?” This type of disclosure is not what is required for describing an invention in a patent application (see Tip #5). It is often ignored until later stages of the examination of a US patent...

Note: Our seventh tip in a series. To view previous articles please click here. When I was just starting out in patent law, I had the great pleasure of taking my children to a museum exhibit showing full-scale models of inventions from Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks. Walking through the ingenious creations on display left me no less open-mouthed in wonder than my kids.  But then the naïve patent...