Speaker 1: Okay, I'm back. In this video, I want to talk about when you're ready to file intellectual property. When you're ready to protect your inventions, what should you do and who should you find to protect those? Watch this video and I will save you a lot of heartache. This is Stephen Key. Okay, before we get started, I have to make a disclaimer. I am not a patent attorney and I'm not giving you legal advice. What I'm giving you during this video is practical business advice and how to protect your intellectual property. All right, I'm going to start off by saying I've been through this process for years and years and years about protecting my ideas and using patents and using patent attorneys and I have to tell you there's things that you need to watch out for. Here's the first thing and I wrote down, I have a lot of notes there. Number one, if any patent attorney is selling fear by telling you that, hey, you better do something fast, someone's going to do it before you, run from that patent attorney. That is number one. Number two, what I want you to do when you find maybe a patent attorney you want to work with, ask them about their process of billing. Get a budget. Ask them what is it going to cost through this whole process and make sure they give you really good advice in terms of this is what it's going to cost and make sure they do include office actions. That's right. They never include office actions because those can get really expensive. What is an office action? Real simple. When you file a non-provisional patent application, it goes to the USPTO, a year and a half later that office, that patent examiner sends back a rejection, a rejection letter. He rejects your application because of this prior art. That's called an office action. You are typically going to probably get about three of those things. It's awful. They're very expensive. When you get one, you guys, you're going to freak out, but realize for your patent attorney or patent agent, regardless, when they respond back to an office action, it's going to cost you anywhere from $2,500 to $3,500. When you have three, you're spending close to another $10,000. Be aware that if they don't include that in the price of what it's going to take, run from that patent attorney or patent agent. The next thing I want you to watch out for and ask the person you're going to work with, patent attorney or patent agent, what do you do with office actions? Do you write a reply back or do you do interviews? The best thing you want to do and make sure that person has a great track record conducting interviews with the patent examiner at the USPTO. Those interviews, that's a way for that patent attorney to talk to that examiner and get your patent issued because they're talking about it. If you're the person you want to work with, that patent examiner, I mean that patent agent or that patent attorney, if they want to not have an interview, that's a red flag for me because those interviews allow you to find out exactly what you need to do to get that patent issued. Make sure they love doing the interviews. Next, your patent attorney. When you first start out, you want to make sure you have a new and novel idea. You might want to do a patent search. What do you mean you might? You have to do a patent search. If your patent attorney conducts your patent search for you, in my opinion, that's wrong. They shouldn't be doing those searching. You should have an independent third party do the search. I think it's a conflict if you're asking your patent attorney to see if there's any other patents out there that conflict with yours because they want your business. I don't like it. Have an independent third party do that worldwide patent search for you. If they don't do that, if they want to do it themselves or don't want to do it at all, find a different person. Here's another one. Ask them what is their success rate of getting patents issued. That's perfectly fine. Hey, you file a lot of patents. What's your success rate? They should be able to provide that information for you to see if the guy's any good. The other thing that you want to make sure is ask them about, in fact, read a patent. Do this. Ask them about their success rate, but also read one of their patents that they have written before. If you cannot understand it, find another patent attorney. It has to be done in such a way that's easy for people to read. That could be a potential licensee. That could be an investor. That could even be the patent examiner or who else. If it's not easy to read and understand, it's confusing, find someone else. Please realize the people that are writing these applications have an engineering background. It doesn't mean they're great communicators. Make sure it's easy to understand. What else should you watch out for? Yes, here's the biggest one. If you reach out to a patent attorney or patent agent and they want you to file a non-provisional patent application, not a provisional patent application, but a non-provisional patent application that's like a real patent now, run. You see, this whole process at the very beginning for us inventors is to test the market. We don't have all the information. We're going to make some changes because we're just starting out to see if we have a really good idea. So filing a provisional patent application is very inexpensive. You can do it for yourself or you can have them do it for you, right? But if they tell you, oh, no, no, no, you should file a non-provisional patent application, they're doing you a disservice in my opinion. What that basically means instead of paying maybe $2,000, you might be paying $25,000. It's a wrong move because you're going to be making some changes. I can guarantee it. And if you file for a patent too early and you have to make changes, guess what? You have to file another one. So it's ridiculous. Watch out for those guys. If your patent attorney is running ads, that's right. I said it. I'm going to say it. Running ads, I would look for somebody else or get referrals at least. Good patent attorneys don't have to run ads. They don't have to do that because they're doing good work. They get referrals. So be careful of these so-called great patent attorneys that are going to help you with your great idea. All right, so what do I mean? You guys, it's really simple. You have to do all these things. Make sure when you're working with a patent attorney, you give them good information because they're only as good as the information you're providing them. So what does that mean? If you have a prototype, fantastic. Know what works and what doesn't work. If you have marketing material that knows your point of difference compared to similar ideas, let your patent attorney see that marketing material. He'll know what's important to protect. Know all the similar products that are out there on the market so you know why yours is different and you've designed it that way. Make sure you do some type of worldwide patent search to overcome prior patents that are going to get in your way from those patent examiners. Ask your patent attorney for referrals. Make sure you can read their stuff that is clear and concise and you get it. They do include office actions and the total cost of this whole process. And don't let them sell fear. All right, this is Stephen Key. Thank you for watching this video. I'm looking forward to doing the next one. Subscribe down below. We're trying to hit 70,000 subscribers and you can help me do it. Once again, I'll see you next time.