Most of our Blog posts to date have not been self serving but the foregoing is a question we hear regularly and I can’t think of a better forum to address this question. Truth be told, picking a good patent lawyer and intellectual property law firm can be a very difficult task and is not one that should be entered into lightly. But why should you choose us over the competition? There are many reasons and in the next week or so I will discuss them in a series of blog posts.

  • We have multiple patent attorneys on staff: technology considerations. The importance of this over solo practitioners cannot be over emphasized. Our attorneys have different areas of technical expertise. Chances are that if one or our attorneys does not have experience in the field pertaining to your invention one of our other patent attorneys will. We have with experience drafting patent applications in all of the following technical areas: mechanical devices, computer hardware, software, materials, chemical compositions and formulations, biotech-related innovations and energy-related innovations to name a few. It is safe to say that a solo-practitioner by himself will not have the base of technical knowledge that three attorneys will have combined. It is not uncommon to have an invention that crosses into two or more technical areas and likewise it is not uncommon for L&L attorneys to interface with each other to ensure that the technical aspects of a client’s invention are properly disclosed in a patent application.
  • We have multiple patent attorneys on staff: legal considerations. Patent law specifically and intellectual property law generally is constantly changing. Furthermore, legal decisions are rarely crystal clear in their holdings. However, because there are three patent lawyers on staff, we often debate the meanings of seminal decisions within the office to help formulate strategies that maximize benefit to our clients. Solo practitioners often do not have this type of day to day contact with other patent attorneys, and as such, the risk that they might misconstrue changes in the law perhaps to a client’s detriment is significantly increased.
  • Our patent attorneys have real world engineering and science experience. Many if not most patent lawyers proceed directly from completing their undergrad engineering/science degrees to obtaining their JDs and becoming lawyers. In other words many have never held a job as an engineer or scientist. And most of the remainder spent perhaps 3-5 years in the “real world” before becoming a patent attorney. At L&L, we believe understanding science and technology is about more than just obtaining an undergrad degree: it is about real life experience. The patent lawyers at L&L have real world experience and lots of it. Combined the three of us have spent well over 50 years practicing as engineers and scientists before making a midlife carrier change to pursue patent law. Personally, I have the experience of inventing several products in the bicycle industry and taking those products from paper to the market through a company that I founded.

Check back in the next few days or so for additional reasons in parts 2 & 3, and perhaps, even part 4.