INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LEGAL SERVICES
PATENT SERVICES
Patents cover a complex area of law. To help you decide which services are best suited to your particular situation, the Law Office of Michael O’Brien has prepared a series of articles that explain the different phases of the patent prosecution process in great detail. These articles will also give you an idea of what the different services cost.
The patent scheme begins when an inventor comes up with an innovation. The inventor must then determine whether or not he or she has a patentable idea. In order to determine what to patent, the inventor should endeavor to reduce the invention to practice, if at all possible. In addition, the inventor may seek the assistance of a patentability search, which will let him or her know what other types of inventions are on the market. Both the reduction to practice and the patentability search will then enable a Registered Patent Attorney to render a patentability opinion that assesses the likelihood of the inventor to receive a patent for his or her invention.
If the inventor chooses to proceed, a Registered Patent Attorney can draft a patent application and submit it to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on the inventor’s behalf. After submission, the application goes through two kinds of review: (1) the Office of Initial Patent Examination (OIPE) will review the formalities of the application while (2) a patent examiner will review the application’s substance.
If the application passes both sets of review, the allowed claims will be patented after they are published and the inventor pays the requisite fees. But the process is not always so simple. For instance, if there is a mistake that seriously affects patentability, the inventor can surrender the patent and ask the patent office to reissue it. Similarly, if the inventor finds new prior art, then he or she can ask the patent office to consider the new material and reexamine the patent. Finally, if the inventor cannot obtain a satisfactory result with the examiner, he or she can appeal to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences and then to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.