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Quality Provisional Patent Application (qPPA) Prep (Moderate 1)

Quality Provisional Patent Application Prep.

If cost is of high concern yet quality is still an important goal, then you may want to consider our Quality Provisional Patent application (qPPA) filing instead of a regular Utility patent application, which will get you provisional patent pending for 12 months.  The cost for this quality PPA option is only 50% of the quoted Utility fee.  Generally, informal drawings are filed in PPAs.  PPAs are usually done when that additional 1 year is needed to build up enough of funds/cash-flow or confidence to do the Utility.   Under this small entity, flat-fee offer, we still allow you to apply our PPA fee towards the quoted Utility flat-fees during the PPA’s 1 year pending period.  Most patent firms do not allow this crediting of your PPA payment because their PPAs are written in a more vague/rough manner and completely gets scrapped/reworked, like we do for our cost focused PPA work.  However, that is not how we do our qPPAs.  Instead, the way our qPPAs work is that we legally write them just as we do for our full Utility patents, except we skip optional sections which generally do not impact quality terribly much (e.g., claims, summary, abstract, background, etc.), which saves about half our time, yet keep most of the quality of the Utility.  Then, within the 1 year limit, you pay our balance 50% fee and we complete the remaining half of the patent application for Utility patent filing.  In this way, it spreads the full patent app costs over time, to maybe fit better into your budget goals.  We formulated this bootstrapping approach, among other ways, to help small business/start-ups get their initial/core IP sufficiently protected to raise funds/revenues to better afford full Utility patent(s) at our full fee schedule.  The minimum payment to start our qPPA work is 50% of our Utility quote.


The primary risk that a fast provisional filing helps mitigate is your first to file risk that either another smart person/company will get a filing in ahead of yours, or if your ideas are somehow leaked to a 3rd party (usually during prototyping, development, seeking funding or investors, etc. ), whereby they may file a patent application of their own, usually with variance of your main idea, and effectively take priority/ownership of your innovation, or at least limit you to a very narrow, often easy to design around version of your basic design, while they may get the broader scope.

Moreover, most of the world patent offices have been a first to file system for many decades now, and in many, if not most, foreign patent offices, your patent application will be automatically rejected if your innovation was in any way made or known to the public prior to filing a patent application. A US provisional patent application, appropriately prepared and filed with a broad claim typically constitutes a valid patent filing for the purposes of foreign offices and their first to file exclusion laws.


Another common situation where fast provisional is appropriate/critical is when you have made or expect to make a public disclosure (and/or bar date), which is much too close for your patent attorney to draft patent specification, iterate with you in the revisions process, and file the completed patent application in time, and without very steep brushes.  

Instead, you would immediately file a fast PPA filed as outlined below.  Generally, a PPA filing satisfies the 1 year disclosure bar date law requirement so long as it covers all the matter that was previously disclosed or offered for sale to the public.

The way this usually would work is that your invention submission is filed as a "quick & dirty" PPA and will contain the core concepts/implementation details that the Utility will be based upon, which is usually enough to prove your possession of the invention at the earlier date.  Thus, the fast PPA is there at least as proof of earlier reduction to practice of your core innovation(s), which can be significant benefit in many ways- not the least of which is that it proves you had provisional patent basic rights ahead of anyone else who may later try to take your exact product/idea and file a patent for it.  Of course, such a “quick & dirty” PPA is very narrow and easy for others to get around, so, especially under the new first-to-file law, you should generally not wait more than 2-3 months to get the full patent application filed; otherwise, there is a much greater risk that others could patent loopholes in the fast PPA which are usually closed in the full patent.


 

How to Engage our Services

  1. Determine and select the quality level that best fits your goals and budget (i.e., Creative, Top, Good, or Basic);

  2. Instead of our standard full prepayment policy for reduced fixed-fee work, you can take advantage of a reduced minimum down payment fee that is 50% of the below quoted fixed-fee (plus any rush fee quoted) to start patent work on each case. The remaining 50% fees are later due upon your receiving the completed 1st draft of the patent specification for your review/revision.

  3. To get started simply configure the case work according to your situation, using the above menus, add the item to your shopping cart (you may edit your cart for any changes).

  4. Proceed to do the checkout process to make your pre-payment of the above fee amount (e.g., online or ).  If you are paying using methods like PayPal/Zelle/check/money order/bank wire/bank depost/ etc., first make the payment using one of those "off-line" means, 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.

  5. After you submit your payment 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.).

  6. 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.

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

Of course, if you have any questions not yet answered, or otherwise require any help, please do not hesitate to
contact us. We will happily assist you.

Pricing

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