Your responsibilities and your patent attorney's responsibilities

Your patent attorney is a paid professional who is responsible for helping you draft your patent application, and helping you file your patent application. He or she is also responsible for helping you negotiate with the patent office during the patent examination process when the patent office may ask that certain claims be modified. Your patent attorney should also be able to advise you on the finer points of the law, and on how you can obtain international legal protection for your invention (or at least refer you to a legal professional who can).

However, it is your responsibility to ensure that your invention is novel and is not in the prior art. You must execute a prior art search, or hire a professional or your patent attorney to do it. Your patent attorney is not responsible for guaranteeing that your application is novel. This is important, because you don't want to spend a lot on patent application legal fees only to have the patent office deny your patent application because your invention is not new.

You also need to sit down and assess the commercial value of your invention. Filing a patent costs a lot of money, and you need to have an idea of how you can make back the money from your patent. Your patent attorney is not a business person in your field, and he or she won't be able to assess the commercial value of your patent as well as a business person might. Just remember; just because you have a patent doesn't mean the patent is worth any money. There are thousands of patents that have never made a cent.