How feasible is it to get a patent without an attorney (it is relatively advanced and there are few attorneys with acceptable knowledge)?

You can read some literature (like Patent It Yourself by Pressman) and have a reasonable shot at preparing a document that, ultimately, will become a patent.

The question you didn’t ask is what the value of that patent is. I hate to sound elitist, but without an attorney steering the ship from the beginning, it’s unlikely that patent will have substantial value.

It’s not that patent attorneys are gods among men, who uniquely possess the high degree of intellectual rigor to prepare a patent application. It’s just that patent law is insanely complex and unintuitive. There are a ton of ways you could go wrong.

And worse yet, by “wrong,” I don’t mean you’ll limit your chances of getting a patent. No, you’ll get a patent. But there will be some odd phrase buried somewhere between the application you prepared and the advocacy you undertook to get the application granted that will drastically limit the scope of the patent. And to the trained eye, those phrases jump off the page.

To put it another way, when I was a young patent attorney, the typical process would be that I’d draft an application and send it to an experienced partner for review. We’d inevitably meet to discuss it.

There often followed a word-by-word cross examination about why I wrote the application the way I did. “Do you need this word? Are we going to get a patent because of this word, and not get a patent without it? What purpose does this word serve?” That kind of thing.

For a long time, I would come away from those meetings with a much better understanding of the invention, and how to write a much better application. I like to think of myself as a reasonably clever guy, but even after law school and internships and all that, I couldn’t write a good patent application for at least a year after practicing. I am not unique in that regard.

As for the technological demands for understanding your invention, I assure you, someone can understand it. The good news is, they have you to help them. These days, it’s not hard to find a patent attorney with a PhD in the discipline your invention is in — at least broadly speaking.

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