1. Patent agency is an important part of the patent system, and its role and value are being recognized by all aspects of society. The quality of patent agency directly affects the possibility, quality, time and money cost of obtaining patent right, and these effects are usually unpredictable and difficult to recover, and even difficult to be recognized by ordinary clients. This paper attempts to uncover the mystery of the quality of patent application agents, so that ordinary clients have the opportunity to know the performance of their chosen patent agents and master the scale of evaluating the quality of patent agents.
2. The demand for patent agents may vary from client to client, which is mainly manifested in the language communication ability and the agent's understanding of related technical fields. For example, for clients who lack the ability of text disclosure, the agent must have better oral communication ability, and obtain the technical scheme and implementation details that the inventor wants to protect by using the language that the inventor can understand and understanding the technology; For clients who are not good at expressing technical solutions with drawings, agents must have the ability to understand their ideas and correctly express their intentions with drawings on their behalf; Clients who are experienced in patent protection may pay more attention to the comprehensive quality of agents, including heuristic opinions on technology and law strategy; For clients who have no patent experience, they may need an agent who can tell them the patent application procedure in simple terms and help them realize it.
3. The evaluation object of patent agency quality is a process, which mainly includes three aspects: preparation of application; Application link and post-authorization link. Among them, the application preparation process is from selecting an agent to establishing the principal-agent relationship to completing the patent application documents, and the application process is from submitting a patent application to obtaining patent authorization; The post-authorization link is usually ignored by the agent in the application stage, and the role of the patent application agent in this link may also be ignored by the client.
4. The quality of the agent's work in preparing the application is mainly to see whether the patent agent can complete a better quality application document with higher efficiency within the required time limit. Considering the time limit is mainly to avoid the loss of novelty caused by the slack of patent agents. There was an agent who submitted a design patent to the Patent Office more than 4 days after the applicant entrusted and provided all the information. Unfortunately, during this period, the applicant participated in the exhibition and the products were sold, so that when the patentee filed an infringement lawsuit in the future, the infringed party had the evidence of public sales before the application date, which made the obligee lose the chance to win the case. It should be said that the patent agent is negligent in grasping the filing time. Of course, when the client entrusts, he puts forward specific filing date requirements for the agent, which can avoid similar situations. In the process of preparing the application, the efficiency factor is also very important. If the agent knows nothing about the technology he represents and is strict with the technical disclosure provided by the applicant, he can't wait for the inventor to complete all the application documents himself. Or, it is an incompetent and irresponsible practice to ask the inventor for supplementary information every time you encounter a problem, more than ten times or even dozens of times, which makes the inventor bored and seemingly responsible. Generally speaking, in the process of preparing the application, the exchange of opinions with the inventor and the revision of the text should be completed within seven times.
5. As the quality of application documents is the key factor to implement the patent right and affect the value of patent intangible assets in the whole patent life cycle, the evaluation of application documents is the core of agency quality evaluation. The patent application documents record the rights that the applicant may obtain and the detailed explanation supporting the claimed rights.
6. The patent claim should be inspected emphatically: 1) The technical scheme recorded in Claim 1 or other independent claims contains all the necessary technical features needed to achieve the purpose of this patent, and there are no redundant technical features. In other words, the technical features recorded in Claim 1 should be neither less nor more for anyone to complete this patent; 2) When the expression representing each technical feature in Claim 1 is sufficiently different from the prior art and does not affect the realization of the purpose of this patent, a higher expression should be adopted as far as possible, such as "coupling" instead of "connection", "waveform generator" instead of "sawtooth wave generating circuit", and "connecting device" instead of "nylon adhesive tape". 3) In the dependent claims, the necessary features are refined and unnecessary features are supplemented with appropriate density, so as to define as many variations of the technical scheme as possible.
7. For the description supporting the claim, we can consider checking: 1) All the contents in the claim can be supported in the description; 2) The terms in the specification are professional, definite and consistent; 3) The description of the technical background in the specification is objective, and the description of the purpose of the patent or the technical problem to be solved is corresponding to the technical scheme to be protected; 4) The attached drawings and specific implementation methods should fully support all the technical solutions recorded in the claims. For example, in the claim, an interval range of a chemical component is claimed, so the range should be supported by giving a plurality of points belonging to the interval in the embodiment.
8. In the application process, the agent of the invention patent should not only be responsible for effectively monitoring the relevant time limit and reporting the progress of the case to the client in time, but also deal with the examination opinions of the patent office on the application in a timely and responsible manner. When major amendments are involved, the agent should seek the opinions of the client, or make appropriate amendments to the application documents, or make well-founded statements on the examination opinions. In this link, two situations should be avoided. One is that there is a major change in the interests of the entity without the consent of the client. The other is that there is no agent's own opinion on the handling of the review opinions, and the client is completely allowed to provide opinions. In this link, it is essential to carefully study the review opinions and the reference documents.
9. Generally speaking, after the patent is granted, the client may entrust an agency to pay the annual fee on his behalf, but he rarely finds an agent again, and the agent no longer maintains the relevant professional agency relationship because the matters stipulated in the agency contract have been completed. However, whether the client can obtain the responsible professional service of the agent after the patent is granted is also an important part of evaluating the agency quality, including the judgment of patentability and infringement when the patent is infringed. It also includes the tracking of related patents and their legal status, and the position of the patent in the patent tree or patent network. In terms of the technical and legal values of the patent, the agent at the application stage may have a deeper understanding than other agents.
1. In short, there is no doubt that entrusting different agents will have different agency quality, and entrusting the same agent in different cases will also have different agency quality. Even the mentality of the principal will affect the agent. Evaluating and selecting suitable agents can protect and optimize the interests of applicants. Of course, you can't blindly choose the lowest price when choosing a patent agent. If the price is low, you can't guarantee the quality of the agent. It can be said with certainty that the loss caused by the low quality of the agent must be far greater than the money saved on the agency fee!