Category: Patents

A potential client will sometimes ask:

what’s your fee for filing a provisional patent application?

or sometimes the question will be:

what does it cost to apply for a provisional patent?

Or, by far the worst telephone call to receive in this general category is the potential client who cheerfully explains that he or she has prepared a draft provisional patent application, that the subject matter is “simple” and so the document should not require very long to review, and can I please just “touch it up” and file it with the USPTO?  The caller makes clear that whatever bargain-basement price I would have charged to draft a provisional patent application, the caller expects me to quote a still smaller price to merely “touch up” the document.

When this happens, generally I politely refer the potential client elsewhere, but when pressed I will sometimes answer along these lines …

Continue reading “What it costs to prepare a US provisional patent application?”

This Sunday I will be traveling to Michigan to speak at the Spring Seminar of the Intellectual Property Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan.  The Seminar will take place this coming Monday March 16.

Most of us, when we were learning how to prepare a response to a patent Office Action in the USPTO, were taught to load up the caption with every conceivable piece of information.  When I was first in practice I was taught to provide not only the application number but also the art unit, the Examiner’s name, the filing date, and the title of the invention.  Some years later the USPTO introduced the “confirmation number” and this, too, went into the caption. Now I skip all of this and I use the application number and nothing else in the caption.  Why?

Continue reading “What caption to use when responding to a patent Office Action?”

There’s a fascinating thread over at the EFS-Web listserv today, about general authorizations to charge USPTO Deposit Accounts.  As I will discuss in this blog post, I think that nowadays it is unwise to give a general-authorization-to-charge to the USPTO in a patent application.

Continue reading “Why it’s a bad idea to generally authorize charges to your Deposit Account”