Attorney fees
In Part 1, we discussed the government fees for applying for and obtaining a patent. However, the fees charged by your patent attorney make up the bulk of the cost of most patents. Here, costs can vary widely. The graph below gives a good overview of what you can expect to spend to get a patent issued, depending on who you choose to prosecute your application. Recall from part one that government fees make up only about $1560 of these costs. Read on for greater detail.
On the one hand, you can file the patent yourself, in which case the only additional cost is your time. For most inventors, I do not recommend this course for a variety of reasons (beyond self-interest).
On the other hand, you can have a big law firm handle your patent application, although many will not deal with individual inventors. Although charges can vary based on geographical area, typical charges would be $10,000-15,000 to prepare most utility applications for filing and about $2500 to respond to an Office Action. Note that big firms often charge by the hour (typically in the range of $300/hr+). This means that you will not know the exact cost until after the work is done. Smaller firms, in contrast, often charge a flat rate for their services.
In between, there are various levels of patent agents and patent attorneys with different qualifications and fees. Selecting the right agent or attorney is an important topic that I will cover in another post. Here, I will give the costs for various fee levels. For purposes of comparison, I will add two more fee levels- a cheap patent agent with $2500 applications and $900 responses and a small firm, quality attorney with $4500 applications and $1200 responses.
Every patent will require preparing and filing an application. How many Responses to the Examiner are required will vary based on a number of factors, including the differences between your invention and what other inventors have done before you, the quality of your patent attorney and application, and the scope of protection you need/want. In my experience, the average application requires three Responses and an RCE, or sometimes two Responses and an Appeal Brief. Keep in mind that some difficult applications may require up to 8 or 9 Responses. A typical application also will require one interview with the Examiner to reach a final agreement on allowance of the application. A big firm that is close to the Patent Office might charge $2000 for such an interview, while a smaller firm or agent would charge $500-1000.
Many attorneys and agents also tack on small fees for various other services, such as filling out and filing paperwork, conducting long meetings, etc. I have not conducted a comprehensive survey of billing practices in these areas, but you can generally expect such fees to add up to about $1000-1500 for a small firm and probably closer to $5,000 for a big firm or under $1,000 for a low-cost agent.
So prosecuting your application yourself, the only cost is of your time. Adding up all these costs with a big firm, the cost would be about $27,000 on average. A value-conscious inventor that decides to go with a smaller, more specialized, but high quality firm could expect to pay about $10,000 on average, while the choice of a low-cost patent agent would result in about $6500 in fees.
Adding these costs to the government fees I addressed in Part 1, we arrive at the following results. The average utility application costs $1560 in government fees, plus $27,000/$10,000/$6500/0 for a big firm/small firm/agent/do-it-yourself, bringing total costs to $28,560/$11,560/$8,060/$1560 for total fees from preparation and filing of the application to issuance of your patent.
For particularly difficult applications, the results diverge even more. At 8 Responses, a big firm’s total fees are approaching $40,000, a smaller firm $16,000 and a low-cost agent $11,000. However, the calculations get tricky at this point. Generally speaking, the better the firm, the more quickly an agreement on allowance will be reached in these difficult applications. With easier applications this comes into play as well, but the main effect of higher quality for such applications, in my opinion, is the scope of protection achieved.
Please let me know if you have anything else you would like me to cover in this post or if you have any suggestions or corrections. This post was last updated in the Summer of 2008.
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