How Patent Attorneys deal with Intellectual Property
Dealing with Intellectual Property
Patent attorneys are professionally licensed attorneys who are allowed to stand before and operate within the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Contrasting, Patent Agents are not necessarily lawyers, but are allowed to practice within these same offices. Many agents come from different backgrounds, not necessarily law.
To be clear, a skilled patent attorney or agent doesn't necessarily work on trademark issues. In fact, patents and trademarks are detached unities of the same government branch holding to the same idea-the protection of an inventor's invention or a business's identity. Patents and trademarks are officially filed for and observed, but do not require the same type (or amount) of work in order to obtain one or the other.
When looking to hire a patent attorney or patent agent, you may find one that provides services that the other does not and vice-versa. If you are planning to litigate, or planning to pursue a patent claim in court, then a patent attorney will have the credentials necessary to stand in front of a court or law, but perhaps not the right to work with patent applications.
However, a patent agent will have the technical knowledge and know-how to work with and/or prosecute patent applications, but will not be able to litigate in a court outside the USPTO. This difficult choice is left to the discretion of the inventor. It most often depends if she or he believes that there is a possibility that the patent will be rejected, which will bring on possible litigation. If this is the case, it might be important to hire an experienced patent attorney who has dealt with such cases and will know exactly how to handle such a case in court.
Consequently, it might be better to hire an experienced patent agent who would know how to properly word the patent application (a former scientist, for example, who understands what you're requesting) so as it won't be rejected in the first place, but rather accepted based on its originality and well-documented approach.
In any regard, whomever you wish to work with, she or he will have to be both qualified and proficient enough to move throughout the mounds of legal work and research that obtaining a patent requires. =========================================================== Discover valuable advice and information about patent searches and applications. Website contains useful articles about us patent searches & applications. Click ==> http://www.us-patentsearch.com/patent-attorney.html
About the Author
Paul Johnson works as a software developer. Over the last ten years, he's made a variety of inventions which he's patented. He shares his experiences and advice in a series of articles about us patent searches and patent applications.
Tell others about
this page:
Comments? Questions? Email Here