Transparent Pre-Attorney Patent Services

When an inventor thinks about patenting his idea, the first thing he or she often does is contact a patent attorney, and that's the right thing to do when the inventor is ready to have a patent application drafted. But there are steps the inventor should take first that will save both time and money and result in a higher quality patent application.

At AlaCarte we offer pre-attorney patent services which include patents searches and invention reports and patent mapping. We do work that attorneys often either farm out to others or expect the inventor to do the job themselves.

There are many Quickie patent search firms that will give you a two page memo and a big pile of patents to go through. They may not charge much but you get what you pay for. We do a more thorough job. First we build a profile that tells us where to look for inventions like yours. Then we use it to build a database of patents to go through, but we don't stop there. We carefully select patents for our expert readers to review and then those readers pick the patents that are closest to your invention to read carefully. We write a commentary and supply excerpts from every patent we read closely.

AlaCarte bills by the job. We let you know exactly what your job will cost before you pay us anything.

Attorneys bill by the hour. Everything you do with your attorney will generate billable hours. AlaCarte bills by the job. We let you know exactly what your job will cost before you pay us anything.

Before you start down the road to a patent , find out find out what the closest prior art to your invention is with an AlaCarte search.

Before you sit down with an attorney to explain your idea , let us help you gather together the information the attorney will want in the form that he or she will want it into an AlaCarte Invention Report . while the clock is stopped.

Finally, if you are building a patent portfolio or already have a number of patents, look into our patent mapping tool, The Strategic Opportunity Cube, to help you manage them. We help you see where your patents fall in the patent landscape relative to those of your competitors. We let you sniff out whitespace opportunities to draft new patents and even tell when your competitors are moving into your territory. Find out which patents you should abandon to save on patent maintenance fees.

AlaCarte services are transparent. We will NEVER keep you in the dark while the clock is running. We put each step of our patent searches online as we complete them. You can watch your job as its being completed and even make changes if you wish.

We have nothing against attorneys. We are not a law firm, we work with many different attorneys and agents. We simply feel that a well prepared inventor will get a much better patent application and a shorter and less costly patent examination if he contacts us first.

Please note that work involving practice before the patent office is not provided by BML but is supplied by referral to licensed personnel. See our services list for details.