Your company has a question about your company's patent portfolio. This is an issue for your company's in-house or outside patent counsel, right? Maybe not. If the question relates to whether an invention is patentable and whether the patent is likely to grant, a patent attorney is the correct person to contact. But if the question is whether you should obtain a patent on a patentable invention, your company's patent counsel is quite probably not the correct source of counsel. The latter is a question of patent strategy, which is inherently a business question, not a legal question. However, many businesses assume that when a patent issue comes up, a patent attorney should be contacted because a patent attorney knows about patents. So why are patent attorneys typically not suited to address patent business questions? As many people know, useful, novel and unobvious inventions are patentable. Significantly, however, there is no
Patent Strategy
