patent pending – Intellectual Property Strategy

June 15, 2020June 16, 2020

Get “Patent Pending” – The Number One Reason You Need a Provisional Patent Application to Protect Your Invention (and how to use our 30-day challenge to get “patent pending”)

Inventors are intelligent and inquisitive. That’s a good thing. That’s how your invention came about in the first place.

Be careful, though, of information overload which leads to confusion or, worse, poor decisions based on misinformation from a careless mentor, unscrupulous invention help company, or “social media expert.”

May 15, 2020May 15, 2020

Should you File a Divisional, Continuation, or Continuation-in-Part before your Patent Issues?

Your patent claims are allowed. Your patent is going to issue soon. Congratulations!

Make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to make an informed, strategic decision about whether to keep your patent options open by filing a new patent application and claiming priority to your allowed patent application while it is still pending.

You probably already know that patent applications can claim priority to each other. This lets applicants create a chain of applications, if they want. There are reasons to do this–sometimes the patent office restricts which claims can be examined, and other times applicants want to extend the pendency, or examination cycle, of their patent applications–and there are other reasons to avoid linking patent applications together.

March 20, 2020

Next Steps: Provisional Patent Application

[This post was originally published August 10, 2018, on LinkedIn by Jeff Holman.]

Congratulations!

Your provisional patent application is filed. You now have “Patent Pending” status.

Now what?

March 20, 2020

Patent Guidance: 10 Criteria for Deciding when to File a Non-Provisional Patent Application

[This post was originally published May8, 2018, on LinkedIn by Jeff Holman.]

Ironically, the tasks of preparing and filing a patent application might be less stressful than actually making the decision to file. Very often, inventors file a provisional patent application, get “patent pending” status for 12 months, and then stress over whether to file a non-provisional patent application before the provisional patent application expires. Here are 10 criteria to help make that decision easier.