Patents protect the technical work that sets your products apart, but they only pay off when you treat them strategically: protecting the right things, clearing your path before launch, and using your rights in deals. We provide patent counseling across software, electronics, life sciences, and manufacturing, from attorneys who came out of engineering and can engage with your inventions directly instead of needing them dumbed down first.
Deciding What To Protect
Effective patent strategy starts with figuring out which innovations are worth the investment. We work with your inventors and R&D teams to identify potentially patentable developments, weigh their commercial and competitive significance, assess novelty and non-obviousness, and consider whether trade secret protection makes more sense in a given case. The aim is to direct your patent budget toward the inventions that actually matter to the business, not to rack up filings for their own sake.
Freedom To Operate
Before you launch a product or roll out a process, you want to know whether you risk infringing someone else's patents. We search for relevant patents, analyze claim scope against what you are actually doing, evaluate the validity and enforceability of anything concerning, and assess the real risk level. Where conflicts show up, we advise on design-arounds, licensing, and other ways to manage exposure, so you can move forward with a clear-eyed view rather than crossed fingers.
Patentability And Prior Art
Before spending on prosecution, it pays to understand what is already out there. Prior art searches surface existing patents, publications, and public uses that bear on patentability. Our patentability opinions evaluate novelty and non-obviousness against that prior art, assess the claim scope you can realistically expect, and recommend how to proceed. Knowing the landscape up front tells you where prosecution dollars are well spent and how to position an application to come out the other side with claims worth having.
Opinions And Patent Deals
Patent opinions support business decisions and manage risk: non-infringement opinions analyze whether specific activities infringe, invalidity opinions assess whether an asserted patent holds up, and freedom-to-operate opinions survey the broader landscape. Prepared with real rigor, they can show good faith against willful infringement claims and satisfy investor or lender diligence. On the transaction side, we handle patent due diligence, license negotiation, assignments, and the representations and warranties that allocate risk in patent-focused deals.
Post-Grant And International Strategy
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board offers ways to challenge validity outside district court, and inter partes review, post-grant review, and covered business method review each carry distinct requirements and trade-offs. We advise on whether to bring a PTAB challenge, defend your patents against petitions, and coordinate with parallel litigation. Because patent rights are territorial, we also help plan international filings, manage Paris Convention and PCT strategy, coordinate foreign counsel, and keep costs in check across a global portfolio.