The best protection you have is a well-worded application. A patent application needs to be sufficiently detailed to be possible to grant but also sufficiently broad to prevent the protection from being too narrow. An application that is worded to narrowly results in a patent that is, in practice, rather ineffectual from a legal perspective. Patent attorneys are experts at this and can help you draw up an application that is of a high quality.

Consequently, PRV recommends that you engage a patent attorney who helps you write the application, responds to notices and ensures that fees are paid on time. Looking at the statistics, more applications where a patent attorney is used are granted than those where an attorney has not been used. This is because the quality of the application is significantly higher when a patent attorney is used.

An inventor’s thoughts about patent attorneys and the quality of an application

‘You want to have as strong a patent as possible, and the quality is affected by all the information I write in my application.

If I write the application myself, the result is not as good as when collaborating with a patent attorney who knows exactly how the patent system works.

A poorly worded patent application can result in the patent actually being worthless when it’s time to protect myself against infringements or defend myself in court.’

- Lena, inventor