360° Patent Strategy

The question

A patent gives you the right to stop others from using your invention for up to 20 years. Whether it earns its cost depends less on the number of patents than on a handful of decisions: what is worth protecting, in which countries, through which route, and with what claims.

Most clients come to us with a concrete version of that question. A product is about to be shown at a trade fair. A research team has a promising result and an investor is asking about protection. A competitor has started filing in your field. Or a portfolio has grown over the years and nobody can say any more why it looks the way it does.

Timing matters most. Patent law works on a first-to-file basis and the European Patent Convention has no general grace period: a presentation, publication or sales offer made before filing can destroy novelty. The first conversation is therefore often about what has already been disclosed.

Typical situations are a start-up preparing its first funding round, a scale-up whose product is about to enter new markets, a research group or spin-out with a result that may be patentable, and an established company that wants to know whether its patent spending still matches its business. In each case the starting point is the same: what do you have, what is public already, and what do you want to be able to do in three to five years?

Our approach

We work with a team of attorneys and European patent attorneys, so legal advice and technical drafting are done by the same people.

We start by listing what you have and what you are about to bring to market, including inventions that nobody has thought of as inventions yet. Finding the IP you already have describes how that review works, and protecting software explains where patents do and do not help for code.

Next we test the idea against the state of the art. Our patent analysis and research retrieves and structures the relevant documents; an attorney reads them and tells you what they mean for the claims you can realistically obtain. If you need a wider answer, patent research goes further.

Then we choose the route. A European patent can be validated country by country, or its holder can request unitary effect for the participating states. The consequences differ for cost, for enforcement and for exposure to central revocation. The Unitary Patent and the Unified Patent Court explain both, and you can run the numbers yourself with the Unitary Patent calculator.

Finally we put figures next to the options. Our IP cost estimator splits official fees, professional fees and disbursements per jurisdiction and compares scenarios over time, so that the budget conversation takes place before the filing and not after it.

The division of labour is deliberate. The technology retrieves, sorts, compares and calculates. The attorney decides: which claims to draft, which prior art really matters, which route to recommend, and what risk you can accept. The strategy document states these judgements openly, with the assumptions behind them, so that you can challenge them.

What you get

• A written patent strategy: what to file, where, in what order and why, matched to your commercial plan.
• A recommendation on route and countries, with a cost comparison you can show to your board or investors.
• Patent applications drafted and prosecuted by our European patent attorneys, with an eye on both examination and later enforcement.
• A view on the Unified Patent Court: whether to keep patents within it or opt out, and what that means for litigation risk.
• Your patents entered in our portfolio and deadline system, so that renewal fees and procedural time limits are followed and you can decide on each renewal with a cost estimate in front of you.

Every deadline and filing is checked and signed off by an attorney before anything leaves the firm. Our technology prepares and organises; the advice is the attorney's.

We also look beyond the patent itself. Patents can support tax incentives for IP income, where a member state offers an IP-box regime, and sit alongside licensing and technology transfer, and we coordinate those workstreams with our tax and commercial colleagues.

A short example: a company developing an industrial sensor expects to sell in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Italy, with a distributor in Spain. Our strategy proposes a first filing at the EPO or a national office, a decision on unitary effect at grant for the four UPC states, national validation in Spain, and a yearly review of which validations are still worth their cost. The company sees the whole cost curve before the first filing is made.

Next step

Tell us what you are developing and where it stands. If a disclosure is imminent, say so at the outset, because that decides the order of work.

Schedule a meeting and we will go through the questions above with you.