Doing certain tasks yourself will undoubtedly save you vast sums of
money, but this comes with the risk that you will mess up, and could
cost you more. Depending on your budget you may decide that
taking care of some issues yourself makes sense.
Filing and paying any official fees are examples of issues you
could take charge of. If you are feeling confident you could try your
hand arguing with the examiner for the inventiveness of your
innovation, and with care you could probably figure out how to
make most formalities amendments.
Drafting however is not for the faint hearted simply because even
after you have researched it for days, you will still not know how
best to word your patent application - experience is everything.
Unfortunately here you must pay for the experts.
The cost of employing a patent agent or draftsman will vary
according to how much experience he or she has. A typical
mechanical gadget could be drafted for 4000 pounds/7000 dollars
by a reasonable reputable patent agency - although the difficulty of
the drafting will vary hugely and may be double this any occasion.
Many retired patent agents or other professionals will offer drafting
for half this value, although you must be very careful to pick apart
those who offer a decent service at a reasonable price and those
who draft a shoddy application for what seems like a reasonable
price. Check that your draftsman has satisfied clients or an
organisation which would recommend them (E.g. An inventor
society). Another sign of a reputable agent would be membership
of the national institute of patent agents (In the UK this is CIPA, the
Chartered Instituted of Patent Agents).
One common tricky decision is whether to pay a patent agency to
fill in your PCT (international) application, which can be useful when
a small enterprise seeks protection abroad. The charges for filling
in this 10 page form are surprising. The last two quotes we heard
about were 3000 and 5000 pounds (5000 and 7000 dollars) - and
that didn't include paying the PCT application fee. If you are making
at most one priority claim, and if you have only one applicant being
a person (not a business) and all your inventors and applicants are
from the same PCT country then perhaps it is fairly safe to fill in the
form yourself - carefully.
Beware that an innocuous mistake on that form can result in you
losing out on patent protection abroad.
Nothing on this site constitutes legal advice, an offer, an offer to treat or a legal relationship.
Always check with your IP consultant.
