Speaker 1: Bill L left a comment on one of my videos. He said, John, I have a fantastic invention, but I just don't have the money to hire a patent attorney to help me file a patent. What can I do to protect my invention? Well, thank you, Bill, for leaving the message. I want to talk about that today. What can you do to protect your invention if you can't afford a patent attorney? Hi, my name is John Ferrell. I'm a Silicon Valley patent attorney. Welcome back to my channel. Now, it's totally possible to file a patent application without using a patent attorney. The patent office is really set up to help inventors. Now, preparing and filing your own patent application is going to take some work and going to take some time, but I'm going to offer some tips in this video on how to make this road through the patent office a little less bumpy. Tip number one, before you start writing your patent application, I think it's a good idea to do a quick patent search. Now, I don't always recommend doing a patent search before filing a patent application. I've actually done several videos on this in the past, but if you're going to write your own patent application, I think there are two really good reasons to do a quick patent search. First of all, it will give you a sense of what others in the industry, what others in your space are filing patents on. What other inventions are similar to yours? What features do they have? These other patents might actually give you some ideas to improve your own invention, and for that reason alone, I think doing a patent search might be helpful. I think the second reason that doing a patent search before writing your own patent application can be really helpful is that it'll give you some samples to look at, to use while you're writing your own application. You can copy some of the formatting and possibly even some of the text. I just think it'll make your patent writing a lot easier if you have some samples and some templates that you can start with, especially if these inventions are closely related to the invention that you're filing an application on. Now, doing a quick patent search can be pretty easy. Just go to Google Patents on the internet, and there'll be a search box that pops up, and type in some keywords that relate to your invention, and Google will help you identify some related patents. Go through these patents and see if any of them relate to the invention that you have. Now, one of the things that's really important here is not to obsess if you find other inventions, other patents that are similar to yours. Now, it's really easy to go down a rat hole where you're thinking, oh my goodness, somebody else has gotten this invention before me. It's actually pretty rare when we do searches that we find patents that are exactly describing your invention. It does happen, but go in with caution. Don't immediately see a patent and think, there's no way I can get a patent on my invention. If you find a related patent to your invention, you need to read it carefully and make sure that they're doing exactly the same thing. It's very likely that you're doing it a different way or that you have an improvement on what the prior art, what the previous patents may have described. Now, tip number two is that if there's any way that you can afford it, try to hire a patent attorney for at least an hour or so to review your patent application before you file it. Now, this is important because patent applications are complicated, and you want to make sure that there's no ambiguities and that there is complete description of your invention in the application. And also, if your patent attorney can help with writing a couple of patent claims at the end of your patent, that would be super beneficial. I'm reminded of the cottage industry in the aviation business of experimental aircraft builders. Now, you spend two or three years building your airplane, starting in a garage, maybe moving it to a barn or a hangar, and then eventually comes the day of your first flight before launching off the runway on the maiden flight of your brand new home-built airplane. It just makes sense that you want to get a skilled airplane mechanic to take a look at your home-built to make sure that the wings are bolted on and that you're not going to end up at the end of the runway as smoking mess. The same thing really applies to your patent application. Think of this as a home-built airplane. You want to take off and arrive as smoothly as you can, and having a professional take a look at your application before you file it. That not only the preparation time and filing fees haven't been wasted, but that you'll have a more efficient and easier pathway through the patent office to allowance with your new application. Now, tip number three, the U.S. Patent Office has a program for helping individual inventors who are not represented by counsel. And you can find this program by going to your web browser and searching for Patent Office Pro Se Assistance. And your web browser will take you to an entire website at the Patent Office filled with resources to help you as an individual inventor. Now, in addition to finding forms and videos, there also will be a phone number that you can call where you can talk with someone at the Patent Office about the preparation and filing process of your application. Now, I want to hasten to add here that although there are patent attorneys at the Patent Office that are available to help you get your patent application on file, you want to be very careful about what kind of assistance you get from these attorneys. They mean well, but you have to understand that very few patent attorneys at the Patent Office have ever represented a real patent client or filed a patent application for the purpose of zealously representing and getting the broadest possible patent claims allowable. The job of the patent examiner is to examine patents and to protect the public interest. So, if you get some help writing your patent claims from an examiner in the Patent Office, you can expect that these will not be the broadest possible claims that you'll be entitled to. That said, however, it's been my experience that the Patent Office will bend over backwards to help you as an unrepresented individual inventor get your application on file and prosecuted. Now, tip number four is that if you can't afford an attorney, you probably qualify as a micro-entity in the Patent Office. This means that you get a 75 percent discount on most of the fees that the Patent Office charges. So, for example, in filing your new patent application, rather than pay roughly $1,500 in patent fees, the cost as a micro-entity of filing your own non-provisional patent application is around $350 depending on whether you file electronically or not. Now, the fees that you pay in the Patent Office will increase as your business hopefully grows, but at least at the beginning, you'll have a chance to take advantage of micro-entity status. In the Patent Office, poverty has its privileges. Tip number five that's real important if you're not using an attorney, if you're filing your own patent application, is that you have to be super organized. Now, this seems really obvious, but it's so important because the patent process generates a lot of documents and you're going to want to keep track of these and be able to find them and keep them organized. What I recommend doing is keeping a folder for your patent application on your computer and having a set of subfolders underneath the folder so that you can keep the individual documents in these subfolders. I put a list of the subfolders that I like to use in the discussion section and you might just take a look at this list of subfolders and see if that might be useful for you as well. Now, once you file your patent application, it's super important just to be patient. It's going to take about a year and a half from the time you file your patent application until you receive that first examination response back from the Patent Office. There's a silver lining to this quiet period, however, this period while you're waiting for a response because during this period, after you file your patent application, you can mark your products patent pending. You can mark your literature patent pending. And for the 18 months following the filing of your application, the Patent Office holds that application in secrecy. During this period, no one's quite sure what you put in your patent application. No one knows what it is you've claimed. Your patent is in secrecy and you are patent pending. And to some extent, at least among your competitors, you are chilling the market. No one's quite sure what it is they can copy from your product and what they can't. So this period, while you're waiting for the examiner to get back to you with the results of your examination and your patent application is secret, you are patent pending and you can take advantage of this in the marketplace. Now I'm considering doing a follow-on video where I talk about the examination period. That is what happens after you file your patent application until the patent application actually issues from the point of view of an inventor who doesn't have representation by an attorney. Now if you're interested in this video, let me know in the comment section below. If there's enough interest, I'll consider doing the video. And by the way, like and subscribe and YouTube will let you know the next time one of my videos is released. Finally, if you found this video useful, I think you'll find the next video useful as well. Oh, by the way, Bill, thank you so much for suggesting this topic. I really enjoyed making the video. Hope you found it useful. And like I said in my comment, hope you crush your new product. See you next time.