Regarding choosing service quality levels, that mostly depends upon your budget and how strong you want your patent to be.  Generally, if your budget is not low, and you want to better overcome rejections and preserve as much patent scope as possible, then the more comprehensive quality level is suggested.  If your budget is very low, and getting protection covering your specific product is more important, then the Basic quality level is suggested.  If you are somewhere in between, then the "Good" quality level is recommended.

 

Please keep in mind that the Examiner will almost always have you narrow the claims far more than you could (budget permitting) get by negotiate back and forth a few iterations. When budget is limited, you should always indicate to us that we should narrow the claims as much as possible to help assure allowance as opposed to our fighting for the broadest claim scope/strength.  If you instruct us to narrow your claims, we will take this to mean that you want to narrow to the maxim towards achieving a next office action allowance.  Keep in mind that, generally, more conservative narrowing tends to increase prosecution cost and time, and the more aggressive the narrowing the lower the future cost. So, please make clear if you are requesting maximum narrowing or not.

 

Also, it is important that you understand that "rejections" are not actual rejections per se.  We almost always make legal arguments and claim language negotiations that overcome the "rejections".  That is where the different service level options come into play.  The higher levels afford more sophisticated arguments that have a better chance of winning and preserving your patent scope and strength, and the lower level is less so. 

 

Among other things, the "more comprehensive" level includes the possible drafting of new claims to improve original one(s) and multiple amendment/argument strategies.  The more comprehensive approach will usually have two or more lines of (usually more sophisticated) arguments and/or amendments to overcome the rejection.  The "more comprehensive" level may also reduce future prosecution costs when at least one the multiple amendment/argument strategies is liked and accepted by the Examiner thereby avoiding more rejections and the associated costs to continue prosecution and responses. For the “Basic” level service, the effort is focused on narrowing the claims as (expected to be) needed to get a next office action allowance.  Under current law, you lose patent protection on anything similar to what was given up by the claim narrowing.  Thus, if patent strength and scope is more important than other factors such as speed and cost, then you should avoid the “Barebones” level.  The “Barebones” approach will usually just accept any allowed claims and maybe include minimal (usually extremely simple) single line argument(s) and/or amendment(s) to overcome the rejection only for a subset of claim(s) and the lead reference focusing on maximally narrowing claims to get allowance.  Generally, no effort is made in the "basic level" to draft new or broadened claims or make multiple amendment/argument strategies typically required to keep or achieve maximum patent protection scope and strength.  If the Examiner does not accept the simple narrowing approach, then prosecution will need to be continued and further office action responses prepared and filed.  The "Good" level strikes a cost effective balance between the "more comprehensive" and “Basic” levels.

 

It may be helpful to know that often the Examiner thinks the cited prior art is so strong that he/she needs a lot of detailed convincing to believe otherwise.  That is, in such cases the Examiner is more committed to believing the cited reference(s) is/are strong and it takes a lot of effort to get him/her to change their general opinion and admit that they are completely wrong.  They don't like to admit that easily.  So the basic approach runs the risk that the surgical amendments and arguments done at that level don't exactly hit the Examiner's "gut feeling" about lack of novelty, and he'll just restate his position in other terms and make the rejection final requiring another round.  It may work just fine, but when budget is available, we usually prefer to hit each reference with a sledge hammer instead of try to kill the fly with a finger.  Also, because the basic level seeks to narrow the claims more than enough than what may have otherwise been needed if a more sophisticated approach was taken; whereas, the "more comprehensive" level additionally tries more conservative approaches towards preserving more patent scope by focusing more on clever arguments and case law citations.

 

If the USPTO is not persuaded by our legal response a Request for Continued Examination (RCE) will usually be required for them to consider further negotiations in your case.  Hence, the "more comprehensive" approach is always suggested when budget permits. When you have significant financial interest in patent scope and strength, then you should select the "more comprehensive" or "top attention" level.  When budget is a constraint, and it is more important to just get a patent on at least a portion of your claim scope, then the basic level is best.

 

Also, please be aware that any new claims you have in mind may be added to your application in our response.  If you have claims that you felt are fully described and supported by the original specification, but were not originally fully claimed, please prove provide us a list of all new claims (in plain English) that you want to add so that we can give you a quote for adding them.  Please note that new claims (of things already disclosed in your patent specification) are allowed, but the USPTO does not allow any new matter (i.e., stuff never disclosed originally) to be added or claimed.  Also, the USPTO will charge you a fee (e.g., ~$150) per new claim you add, which is beyond our quote to do the legal drafting work.

How to Engage our Services

1)     Configure the above linked shopping cart options (if any) according to what best fits your situation, goals, and/or budget.   (you may always edit your cart to make any changes- see below for details)

a)     The service item may have a text entry field named "Please provide any Special Instructions...", where you should enter any specific guidance or information that may be helpful for us to properly process your order (e.g., any case number we've assigned in the subject line above, deadline situations, how this order relates to any other orders, etc.)

b)     The service item configuration total price will be reflected in the "Selected Combination Total" line item below any options menus.  Likewise, the "Service ID" will be updated to encode your configuration selections.

2)     Click the "select service" button to put the service item you configured into your shopping cart. You will notice shopping cart at the top right of the page, which indicates how many items it currently contains. Click that shopping cart icon anytime you want to see what items are in your shopping cart, and you'll notice a pencil icon on each item which enables you to go back and edit the item, and save your edits by again clicking the "select service" button.

3)     Click the "Checkout" button to begin the checkout process.  On the Checkout page, enter your email address, client status, and PoC information for the legal service you are ordering. Then click the “next intake page” button to proceed to the payment indication page.

4)     Make your payment off-line (i.e., not through our website) using one of the methods specified in the below postscript of this quoting email. Currently, online payment methods through our website are not implemented yet.

5)     After you made your payment off-line, return to the above payment page on our website where you will specify how much you paid, by what means, and some kind of transaction receipt/info for us to research and match it up to your order to approve it.

a)     NOTE: Most of our services require 100% prepayment of the quoted fee; however, if our emailed written quote indicates a lesser prepayment amount then instead of our standard full prepayment policy for reduced fixed-fee work, you can take advantage of a reduced minimum down payment fee (e.g., 50% of the quoted fixed-fee, plus any rush fee quoted) to start patent work on each case. The remaining fees are later due at least upon our completing the 1st draft of the ordered legal service for your review/revision and/or our filing.

b)     If you paid using methods like PayPal/Zelle/check/money order/bank wire/bank deposit/ etc., then during the above linked checkout process select the "off-line" payment option, which will ask you for which "off-line" payment means you use and a copy of the transaction information so that we may manually confirm and process it to credit it to your account.

6)     After you register your payment per the above, our system will guide you to our online new case intake forms to gather your administrative information for this new patent case (e.g., POC, contacts, inventors, assignees, work request details, service agreement, etc.).

7)     You will be emailed a link to proceed to our secure client portal dashboard to securely submit your materials, documents and instructions for our legal work.

8)     Our team reviews all your submissions and works with you to validate/improve anything needed for us to properly do our legal work.