How to Gauge How Good Patent Lawyers Are

[jiggabot]

I have heard that writing a good patent is crucial to prevent your idea from being stolen in the future. However, I was wondering how one goes about evaluating lawyers to see how good they are. The lawyers I called seem to vary widely in how they practice. One lawyer has a free initial consult and charges $250 for a patent search. Another charges $1500 for the initial consult + the patent search. I was wondering, why do their costs vary so much? Is this indicative of their expertise or do they just mark up charges arbitrarily?

[Mr. Knowitall]

There's no easy shortcut.

I expect that one of the factors you're encountering is that some patent lawyers do little more than run patent searches, and they do so at fees that undercut the full service firms, often with no direct contact with the client. As patent law is federal they can be retained from any state, do the search from their office, and email or otherwise communicate the result to the client. How good they are? That's going to vary, and not necessarily according to how much they charge.

In terms of securing a patent, once again, there's no formula for determining how good a patent lawyer is. One thing to keep in mind, patent law is a high malpractice area of law. Even good patent lawyers mess up at times, sometimes causing a patent to fail. So one of the big factors that you may want to look for is whether, assuming your patent will be valuable, the lawyer has an established firm and malpractice coverage behind him in the event of the possible invalidation of your patent. Also, a patent lawyer you pay merely to write a specific patent may do exactly that, and do it well, but a different patent lawyer may (for an additional fee) help you consider ways a competitor may try to do an end-run around your patent.

One story that comes to mind is of an inventor who patented three versions of his invention, then pitched the best version to possible manufacturers. One said "no thank you", and then attempted to produce a product that took advantage of his ideas without violating his patent. They succeeded with the patent he attempted to license to them, but because he had the additional patents that contemplated the possible end-runs, their actions violated another of his patents. Had he not guessed the correct alternative process, or had he simply patented the first invention without the alternatives, he would have been out of luck.