Patent Law

Survive in Tough Times? Don't Plate that Patent in Gold

By Les Weinstein, Michael Young, John Leo Wagner, Eric van Ginkel, and Victoria Pynchon

A truly excellent post over at IP Asset Maximizer Blog on reducing legal expenses while still protecting your inventions.  To give you a taste before you speed on over there, blogger and self-described "Intellectual Property and Patent Business Strategist and 'Recovering Patent Lawyer'" Jackie Hutter suggests that the "disciplined" entrepreneur will

obtain[] patent rights that are adequate, but are not so broad as to fully protect the upside opportunity associated with the innovation. The risk to such an approach is that if the innovation is a runaway success, the patent rights may not be broad enough to fully exclude competition. Few product or technology innovations are truly runaway hits, however, so the organization that decided that not all patents must be gold-plated would probably come out significantly ahead in patent legal spends.

To business people, we attorneys can seem like overly anxious mother (and father) hens in the provision of both transactional and litigation services.  I learned this early as a paralegal (back when New York City was bankrupt and Times Square truly frightening to the 23-year old who took her lunch breaks prowling mid-town Manhattan).  Though I worked for the head of the litigation department, my desk was outside the door of the attorney who advised Uniroyal about the potential problems posed by their advertising.  He made the litigators look like pussy-cats, shouting on a daily basis at whoever it was in the ad department who just wanted a little room to create, man, and the "suits" were always worrying about liability for goodness sakes when it didn't much matter if someone sued you if you weren't selling any $%#@^% tires!! (or Sperry Top-Siders).

So remember, everything in moderation.  As Jerry McGuire's infamous mission statement exhorted:  fewer clients; less money. 

(by the way, that's my good friend Russel asking "do you know your name?")

Full post as published by IP ADR Blog on October 17, 2008 (boomark / email).