Speech Heads, you’ll remember from a couple weeks ago when I posted about Bilski v. Doll that I had mentioned a forthcoming patent feature cover article. Well, I am happy to report that the wait is practically over. The issue is out the door and will be stuffed in your mailboxes in a matter of days. That is, of course, unless you don’t have a subscription, which my brother Adam B. says is “colossally stupid” since they’re free, and which should be rectified by clicking here forthwith and making with the subscribing.

In any case, as I was working on the article, trying to jam as much as I could into the increasingly meager looking allotment of words I had, I ended up having to put a lot of interesting—but ancillary—stuff in sidebars that never got printed. For your benefit (and in order to hype the article) I’ll be presenting them here all this week. So let us begin with:

Who Needs A Lawyer Anyway?

If you consider jokes a reliable metric of the way people feel, it seems no one likes a lawyer.

Walt Tetschner, publisher of ASRNews and an independent consultant who has consulted on patent applications, not only doesn’t seem to like them, he doesn’t see much use for them in the patent space. Tetschner remains fiercely skeptical of the use value of using an attorney in the patent process.

“[A lawyer] typically does not clue about the technical area,” he writes in an email to Speech Technology. “Do you know what is involved in searching through the 5 million active patents that exist in the US PTO [Patent and Trade Mark Office]?  Expecting the lawyer to discover prior art is incredibly optimistic.”

To Testschner’s mind, a technologist should be able to file for herself. Her understanding of the technology and expertise in her field (that is her inherent knowledge of the industry and its prior art) should be more capable of competently draft a patent than a lawyer as she is more familiar with the prior art in her field. Tetschner points to the PTO’s own search engine as a capable and comprehensive way of looking prior arts.

Patent attorneys, on the other hand, will defend their practice in the following ways: they are more fully aware of the legal ramifications of patents (they handle the suits and can draft patents to more adequately protect the filer—after all, for a filer, a patent is really a document about legal protection first and technology second); by having attorneys draft patents for them, technologists free their time to work on technology (prosecuting a patent is time intensive); if a patent is truly worth pursuing, it’s worth pursuing professionally.

“I’ve always told clients that if the technology has no value, don’t spend any money protecting it,” says Gregory A. Nelson, an attorney with Novak Druce + Quig. “If it does have value then the cost of professional assistance very small compared to the value of the patent. It’s more often just a question of not needing to file for everything—maybe being more thoughtful about what a company files or does not file for.”

Whether one needs an attorney or not in the end calculus is a matter of goals, means, and preferences.