What it costs to prepare a US provisional patent application?

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 …

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Speaking at AIPLA’s Patent Prosecution Boot Camp

I’ll be speaking this April at the AIPLA Patent Prosecution Boot Camp.  This two-day seminar is tailored to new practitioners (those having less than two years of experience), or others who want to learn the basics of patent application preparation and prosecution. This seminar includes instructional sessions and hands-on claim drafting workshops.

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How to minimize service disruption with a notebook computer

(See followup article here.)

These days my notebook computer is absolutely mission critical for me.  If my notebook computer were to fail and if it were to take some days to get it repaired, the loss of use of the computer for those days would be a really big problem.  Fortunately, a few years ago I figured out how to reduce any service disruption due to a computer failure to just about zero.

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What “MP3” means

mp3-image-2I checked into a hotel recently where the clock radio in the guest room had a conventional 3½-millimeter plug (see photo) which could be plugged into the guest’s smart phone or music player.  This would permit playing music through the speaker of the clock radio.  What I found amusing is what the manufacturer chose to write on the clock to let the user know about this feature — “MP3”.  This is silly.

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