Use Of Many Independent Claims Is A Smoke Screen

The added out-of-pocket cost of using too many independent claims is only part of the problem. The bigger problem is that filing a great many independent claims is often just a smoke screen for an attorney failing to do the difficult mental work of figuring out what the invention really is. The "value added" of a good patent attorney lies not so much in his knowledge of the field of the invention, or the drafting of application per se, but in his conceptualizing of the "invention" at an appropriate level of abstraction. It is that latter skill that allows him to clearly identify and claim the inventive subject matter in a commercially valuable manner.