PATENT LAW
A patent grants you, the owner, a legally enforceable right to prevent others from using your unique invention. In today’s marketplace, innovative companies and inventors that want to turn their ideas into assets need comprehensive, strategic, high-value patents to compete effectively. However, obtaining a patent for your idea can be a lengthy, complex, and costly process without any guarantees of success. That’s why it’s valuable to have an experienced patent attorney on your side.
At the Idea Asset Group, our patent attorneys help secure and protect patent rights for our clients’ ideas in the United States and across the globe. Our job is to turn your ideas into assets. We can help you by:
- Preparing and prosecuting both U.S. and international patent applications
- Working with foreign counsel in obtaining patent protection for technologies in various countries
- Providing international patent oppositions and patent enforcement
- Offering intellectual property counseling, infringement and validity opinions, and due diligence
- Providing post-issuance patent practice, including patent interferences, reexaminations, reissues, oppositions, and inter partes review proceedings, as well as related appeals to the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)
- Performing prior art search and analysis
- Providing patentability and commercial evaluations
TURNING IDEAS INTO ASSETS
At the Idea Asset Group, we employ a radically different approach to protecting your ideas. Put more simply, unlike typical law firms, we don’t create a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all patent for our clients. When you come to us with your idea, our patent attorneys take an active role in exploring the outermost limits of what can be protected. We believe that your ideas are important – the stakes are too high to not push the envelope and explore every patentable aspect of your idea that you are entitled to under patent law. Our unique approach involves a multi-step process that allows us to customize and integrate your patent goals with your business goals while maximizing your patent coverage.
At the Idea Asset Group, we begin every patent application with a thorough evaluation of your idea. During this process, we break apart and analyze each and every individual element of your technology to evaluate whether it may be independently patentable. For some technologies, it is not uncommon to find 5, 10, or even 20 independently patentable innovations in one single idea. Each of these independently patentable directions represents an idea that is sufficiently new and novel enough to justify its own individual patent protection. It is not uncommon for our clients that have worked with other law firms in the past to comment on the number of intellectual property assets they lost out on as a result of their previous attorneys failing to recognize all the patent protection they were entitled to under patent law. See Patent Example
From this initial analysis, we assign each independently patentable direction a grade based on perceived patentability vs. commercial value. Next, we sit down with you and discuss the potential costs and commercial benefits for each independently patentable direction. At this point, we work with you to evaluate how each of the available patent options will integrate with your overall business objectives, as well as how best to position your patent coverage with respect to your competitors. Ultimately, we leave it up to you to choose which independently patentable directions you would like us to pursue. In this way, we are putting you in control of not only your patent coverage, but also your commercial and patentability risks, and most importantly, your overall patent costs. See Patent Example
Once you have decided the scope of the patent coverage that you wish to pursue, our intellectual property attorneys will begin the process of drafting your patent application. Whether it is a domestic or international application, typically the first step in this process is to draft a set of claims for each independent direction you select. Again, at the Idea Asset Group, we take your ideas seriously, so we seek to maximize your potential coverage at every step of the process. By way of example, a typical law firm will only consider a single patentable direction. From that direction, most attorneys will draft, on average, only 20 claims to protect your entire idea. Since, by law, the patent claims will define the limits of your patent protection, such a practice greatly reduces the breadth and scope of your patent protection. Contrasting this typical scenario, the Idea Asset Group specializes in drafting high-claim-number patents. When we draft your patent application, our patent attorneys routinely generate anywhere from 50-100 claims for each independently patentable direction. For more complex inventions, it is not uncommon for our firm to draft anywhere from 300-800 individual claims at comparable costs to traditional firms. By layering multiple independent directions with high-claim numbers, as well as staggering the associated claim fees, we are able to maximize your patent coverage while minimizing costs. More importantly, we are turning your ideas into high-value strategic patents that will hold up in court, as well as in the marketplace. See Patent Example