Posts Tagged: "client"

I used to receive telephone calls, quite frequently, asking about the procedure for preparing and filing a patent application. Today, I no longer receive these calls. I suspect the main reason is that inventors are giving up an expectation that patent protection is even worthwhile. And I get it. If I were to get a call these days, I could no longer paint a rosy picture for would-be patentees… But these days, I fear the conversation would have a different tone. It might go more like this… “for a mere $2,625,000 you can disclose your most important innovation to your competitors, and they can use it and make sure that you actually have no rights to it.”

Many of my clients are not patent specialists. Providing an opinion will help them in deciding on the action to take. Uncertainty about what to do often leads to procrastination by the client, which I want to avoid. Finally, the call to action is simply a sentence asking for client instructions. I used to finish my client communications with “Please provide instructions at your earliest convenience/by some date”. I found that this was too vague and demanded too much effort to process. When the client is at the end of the email, he is often starting to think about the next thing to do on his agenda. I use much more precise calls to action, such as “Please confirm that you will pay the next maintenance fee” or “Let me know if you want me to prepare a response to the office action”.