[quote=Trojan4Life]I was looking at the Legal Zoom site to form the corporation and saw that they also provide a lot of the patent services described in previous posts. Your thoughts on their product?[/quote]
I haven’t looked at Legal Zoom, but I can tell you this: drafting a good patent application is really hard. And I’m not saying that to be self serving – I did primarily litigation/licensing. One of the biggest hurdles is that it requires both scientific/logical reasoning and good writing ability. I would always recommend going and talking to an IP lawyer to make sure (among other things) that you don’t miss any important dates (if you miss a date you can lose all rights in your invention, and there is no way to fix it). Then, if you have the time and choose to do it yourself, I would read Landis on Mechanics of Patent Claim Drafting. The claims are the starting point of the application. Another good resource is Chisum on Patents (a multi-volume treatise).
But bear in mind the following quote from the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Topliff v. Topliff (1892):
The specification and claims of a patent, particularly if the invention be at all complicated, constitute one of the most difficult legal instruments to draw with accuracy, and in view of the fact that valuable inventions are often placed in the hands of inexperienced persons to prepare such specifications and claims, it is no matter of surprise that the latter frequently fail to describe with requisite certainty the exact invention of the patentee, and err either in claiming that which the patentee had not in fact invented, or in omitting some element which was a valuable or essential part of his actual invention.
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You’ll see this quote around a lot when it comes to patent drafting, and I think it is a true today as it was 120 years ago. But again, since I am not your attorney you really need to go find an IP lawyer to talk to. Most will sit down with you for a half hour or so free of charge.
