LegalZoom Collaboration Ends

Readers of IPWatchdog.com probably are aware that over the years I have had a collaborative relationship with LegalZoom.com.  In addition to consulting with LegalZoom.com during the formation of their various intellectual property offerings, for years I have provided a so-called “attorney review” service for those who have sought to create and file their own provisional patent applications.  Inventors would answer basic questions about their inventions on a form created by LegalZoom.com.  This information would then be forwarded to me to review.  I would then review the information and provide comments and suggestions for inventors about how to better describe their inventions in a manner required by the US patent laws.  This service was by all indications extremely popular and very well received by inventors.  Unfortunately, due to recent Patent Office rule changes this attorney review service can no longer be provided in collaboration with LegalZoom.com.

As I have previously discussed in several blog posts (see PTO Kills Invention Promotion and Patent Self-Help Now More Difficult), on August 14, 2008, the United States Patent & Trademark Office profoundly changed the rules that govern what patent attorneys and patent agents may do when working with independent inventors who are seeking advice but not full representation. In a nutshell, the Patent Office has decided that patent attorneys and agents can no longer provide limited consulting to inventors, but rather if an attorney or agent provides specific advice/assistance with respect to a patent application the attorney or agent giving the advice must also file the application on behalf of the inventor. The importance of this is that inventors will no longer be able to merely seek the advice of patent attorneys or agents to review what they have done on their own. These new rules will go into effect on September 15, 2008.

The new rules require, in addition, that all patent application related work be done by or under the direct supervision of a patent attorney. If the patent attorney or agent decides a third party (for drawings or searching) should be brought in, then that is fine, but it cannot operate the other way around. So patent attorneys and agents can still outsource drawings and patent searches, which is fairly typical in the industry. But, a service model that provides an assisted self-help system can, in our judgment, no longer be used going forward without full hands-on administration of such a system by a USPTO registered practitioner.

From the time these new rules were announced through their effective date on September 15, 2008, we were in talks with LegalZoom to attempt to create a workable self-help process that would be in compliance with the new rules and allow us to continue with some type of collaborative arrangement. Unfortunately, we were unable to reach agreement on a workable process under the new rules that was ethical. As a result, we were obliged to end our cooperative arrangement with LegalZoom effective immediately. This is a shame in view of the many happy customers that were able to take advantage of the service in the past. Nevertheless, we do understand and support the rationale behind the new Patent Office rules because they should finally put an end to unscrupulous invention promotion companies. The down side, however, is that inventor assistance services will find it extremely difficult to operate under the new rules.

If you are looking for a reliable do-it-yourself provisional patent application then I would recommend that you consider the Invent & Patent System™, which is something that I have developed over the years. It started out as a teaching tool I used with law students to teach them how to write a patent application. It was then transformed into a self-help patent application creation system that could be used by inventors to create their own patent applications. It is primarily for the creation of provisional patent applications, but can be used with great efficiency to form the basis of a draft nonprovisional patent application. The cost of using this system is just $89, and if you are interested in an attorney review and feedback it can be provided for $200.  This is a far more advanced system then the one that was used by LegalZoom, and cheaper as well.  I know this to be true because LegalZoom was using, and I believe they still are using, a much earlier version of the system that I developed for their use.  So even though old LegalZoom model is no longer ethically allowable because they are not allowed to prepare and/or file patent applications, you can still obtain a low-cost, reliable do-it-yourself patent application system.