Risks of Low-Cost, Volume-Based Patenting

In the December/January 2008 issue of Intellectual Asset Magazine, Craig Opperman and Carina Tan of Morgan Lewis analyse the risks of focusing solely on “low cost” and “high volume” when filing patent applications:

“post-issuance maintenance fees are a significant expense in a high-volume patent portfolio. If a company cuts its patent filing volume in half but demands much higher quality from those applications, its costs may increase slightly (by 10% or so) in the first year, but its per-year maintenance fee costs can be up to 31% less as the patent potfolio matures. Thus, a company can actually save money by focusing on the long term and developing a smaller but higher-quality patent portfolio, rather than just filing as many applications as possible within a fixed budget.”


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