People frequently ask what factors should go into evaluating and choosing a patent counsel. Patent work can be broken down into several areas, including licensing, prosecution, and litigation, among others. A deep technical understanding of the underlying art may be less necessary for licensing and litigation, assuming people familiar with the technology are accessible.
For this post, we will deal with choosing a patent prosecution counsel.
Technical understanding. For patent prosecution counsel, the technical understanding becomes more important, but again dependent on the area. For mechanical inventions, being an expert in that field of mechanical endeavor is probably unnecessary so long as the patent attorney is qualified for mechanical patents. Specialized understanding gets to be more important depending on the sophistication of the art. Cryptological software inventions, for example, probably require a skilled CS person who also has qualification in upper level (i.e., beyond engineer level) mathematics. Pharmaceuticals require not only the biochemical understanding, but access to attorneys skilled in FDA approvals. Numerous examples of the different arts, some requiring only basic qualification, and others requiring specialized qualification, exist.
In regards to efficiency/billing, and also in regard to ability, other qualities than specialized knowledge can be equally or more important such as learning speed, wheel-spinning, and legal conceptual understanding. The speed of learning—there are electrical engineers who can learn quickly, and those who cannot. Since all inventions are by their essence new, novel, and nonobvious, there will be learning regardless of specialized knowledge. Wheel-spinning--there are highly technically qualified attorneys who can take forever to sit down and hammer out the applications. Some people need to take a break every twenty minutes for a water cooler chat. Some like to do an application a day. Legal conceptual understanding—if the highly qualified technician just does not get the fact that patents are ultimately read by non-patent attorneys, and non-lawyers, the product will suffer and may require redrafting requests.
Anyone looking to choose patent prosecution counsel should also determine whether the counsel they consider is stuck in the past or married to inflexible platforms for performance and billing. Is the counsel open to alternative billing structures. Is the counsel open to re-constituted staffing of projects. The old firm tradition of billing hourly, and then maximizing profit by staffing a case with junior level attorneys all answering up the chain to a senior attorney, may not always be the most optimum. Is the counsel open to billing structures that provide motivation for efficiency.
Thus, in terms of selecting counsel for patent prosecution, while some breakdown should be made for specialized arts, to maximize value and minimize unnecessary fees, the evaluator should design a selection process that includes: (a) identifying a pool of base qualified counsel; (b) winnow the most efficient by focusing selection not on degrees or industry experience, but instead on factors which identify and quantify learning curve speed, work energy and motivation, and availability of senior attorneys who are experienced not only in prosecution, but also who have done licensing and who have actually conducted jury trials; and (c) determining whether in this winnowed group the counsel understands, is open to, and able to provide different billing structures so that in-house counsel can price and budget prosecution work in perspective to its worth to the company.
