Patents: how and why to get them
So I filed and was (after nearly 5 years) granted a patent late last year. It cost me around fifty thousand dollars. I have mixed feelings about whether it was worth it.<p>&gt; <i>Yet some lawyers actually recommend against it, since if you do find prior art, you&#x27;re now willfully infringing on it, and should cease and desist.</i><p>I am not a lawyer.<p>The advice I have seen from actual lawyers is that this is essentially an urban legend based on a bloke-in-a-bar-told-me level of legal understanding. If you are going to file, why piss away tens of thousands of dollars on filing expenses when you can spend a few days (or pay a professional searcher $1500-2500) to see if it&#x27;s worth bothering?<p>The &quot;never search, it triples your death-mo-trons!!1!&quot; comes from an easy legal defence for megacorps. Being able to stand up in court and say &quot;we didn&#x27;t know about patent X because it is against company policy to search&quot; is much easier than a protracted, expensive and chancy legal discovery process to try and determine who read what, when, and what they may or may not have understood.<p>&gt; <i>Don&#x27;t expect a patent lawyer to honestly tell you he doesn&#x27;t know your domain.</i><p>Actually, <i>do</i> expect a patent lawyer to honestly tell you their expertise. They have a fiduciary duty to clients. Turns out you can&#x27;t charge $300 or $600 or $900 an hour if you&#x27;ve been disbarred. But <i>do</i> ask about their credentials and experience and <i>do</i> choose according to that expertise.<p>The key is that, having told you their expertise, lawyers will still act on your instructions. I can ask my lawyer to do my laundry if I want. I will be advised that this is not their specialty and that it would be a poor use of my money. But I could insist and my lawyer will shrug and make the arrangements, for several hundred dollars per hour.<p>I did a lot of the legwork on my patent myself -- I drafted a lot of it, carefully studied cited art and wrote my objections etc etc. I am, after all, the person in world who knows it best. But my lawyer could have done it too, it would&#x27;ve just taken longer and cost a lot more.<p>One last piece of advice I got about law firms. The $800-$1000&#x2F;hr places are big city firms. When you hire one, the USPTO examiners will assume you are a GigantoMegaGloboInc and examine accordingly. Sometimes they dislike the booming sound of heavy-gauge letterhead being fired across their bow. A smaller firm can typically give you closer attention and is less likely to seem as impersonal.