Patent agency is an important part of the patent system, and its role and value are being recognized by all sectors of society. The quality of patent agency directly affects the possibility, quality, time and money cost of obtaining patent rights, and these influences are usually unpredictable and irreversible, 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 understand the performance of their chosen patent agents and master the scale of evaluating the quality of patent agents.
2. The needs of patent agents may vary from customer to customer, mainly in language communication ability and the agent's understanding of related technical fields. For example, for the client who lacks the ability of writing disclosure, the agent must have good oral communication skills, use the language that the inventor can understand and understand the technology to obtain the technical scheme and implementation details that the inventor wants to protect; For customers who are not good at expressing technical solutions with drawings, agents must be able to understand their ideas and correctly express their intentions with drawings on their behalf; Customers with patent protection experience may pay more attention to the comprehensive quality of agents, including enlightening opinions on technology and legal strategies; For customers who have no patent experience, they may need an agent who can tell them the patent application procedure in simple language 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 an entrusted agency 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 at the application stage, and the role of the patent application agent in this link may also be ignored by the client.
4. Investigating the quality of the agent's work in the preparation of the application mainly depends on whether the patent agent can complete better application documents with higher efficiency within the prescribed time limit. Considering the time limit is mainly to avoid the loss of novelty caused by the slack of patent agents. Once, an agent submitted 1 design patent to the patent office more than 40 days after the applicant entrusted and provided all the information. Unfortunately, during this period, the applicants 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 evidence of public sales before the filing date, which made the obligee lose the chance to win the case. It should be said that the patent agent's negligence in grasping the filing time. Of course, when the client entrusts, it can avoid similar situations by asking the agent for a specific filing date. 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. In other words, it is an incompetent and irresponsible practice to ask the inventor to supplement the information every time he encounters a problem, and it seems to be 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. Because the quality of application documents is the key factor to implement 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 explanations supporting the claimed rights.
6. It is very important to check the patent claim: 1) The technical scheme described in the patent claim 1 or other independent claims contains all the necessary technical features needed to realize the purpose of this patent, and there are no redundant technical features, in other words, there can be neither less nor more technical features recorded in the patent claim 1; 2) The expressions representing the technical features in Claim 1 should be as high as possible, such as replacing "connection" with "coupling", "sawtooth wave generator" with "waveform generator" and "nylon tape" with "connecting device", provided that they are sufficiently different from the prior art and do not affect the realization of the purpose of this patent. 3) In the dependent claims, necessary features are refined, and unnecessary features are supplemented with appropriate density to define as many technical solution variants as possible.
7. For the description of supporting claims, you can consider checking: 1) All the contents in the claims can be supported in the description; 2) The terms in the manual are professional, clear and consistent; 3) The description of the technical background in the specification is objective, and the description of the patent purpose or technical problem to be solved corresponds to the technical scheme to be protected; 4) The attached drawings and specific implementation methods shall fully support all the technical solutions recorded in the claims. For example, in the claims, the range of intervals of chemical components is claimed, so the range should be supported by giving a plurality of points belonging to the interval in the embodiment.
8. In the process of application, the agent of the invention patent should not only be responsible for effectively monitoring the relevant time limit, but also report the progress of the case to the client in time, and also handle the examination opinions of the patent office on the application in a timely and responsible manner. When major amendments are involved, the client's opinions should be sought, or the application documents should be appropriately revised, or the examination opinions should be well-founded stated. In this link, two situations should be avoided. One is that the interests of the entity have changed significantly without the consent of the client. The other is that there is no agent's own opinion in the handling of review opinions, and the client is completely allowed to provide opinions. In this link, it is essential to carefully study the review opinions and reference documents.
9. Generally speaking, after the patent is granted, the client can entrust an agency to pay the annual fee on his behalf, but he has rarely found an agent, and the agent no longer maintains the relevant professional agency relationship because the matters agreed in the agency contract have been completed. Whether the client can get the responsible professional service of the agent after the patent is granted is also an important part of evaluating the quality of the agent, including the judgment of patentability and infringement when the patent is infringed. It also includes tracking related patents and their legal status, as well as the position of patents in the patent tree or patent network. As far as the technical and legal value of the patent is concerned, the agent at the application stage may have a deeper understanding than other agents.
10. In short, there is no doubt that entrusting different agents will have different agency quality, and entrusting the same agent will also have different agency quality under different circumstances. 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, choosing a patent agent cannot blindly choose the lowest price. If the price is low, the quality of the agent cannot be guaranteed. To be sure, the loss caused by the low quality of agents must be far greater than the money saved on agency fees!