Title

The Title of the patent application should be broader than the Abstract. The Abstract should in turn be broader than the Summary section, and the Summary should be broader than the all of the independent claims put together. Thus, if a patent attorney has claims directed to methods and compositions, he must be careful to word the Title so that it is broad enough to encompass both methods and compositions. Nevertheless, the title should be short. Titles should usually contain no more than about five to ten words.

The Title may allude to the claimed invention, but it is not supposed to recite the invention. Thus, if the claims recite use of a novel class of polymers in automobile tires, the Title may be properly worded as "Polymers Containing...", "Polymers Containing... and Their Use in Automobile Tires", or "Automobile Tire Methods and Compositions", depending on the focus of the claims. One should almost never set forth a preferred formulation in the Title because it would be too limiting.

The U.S. patent office will object to titles that it considers to be mis-descriptive or insufficiently descriptive. That situation arises from time to time when an application is originally filed claiming one aspect of an invention, but then a divisional or other continuation focuses primarily on another aspect. In that instance the child application should usually have a different title from the parent.

Steer clear of using trademarks in the Title. A trademark identifies the source or origin of a particular class of products or services, whereas a patent application is directed to the underlying products or services. Thus, when athletic shoes began using Velcro™ type fasteners, an appropriate title may have been "Athletic Shoes With Interlocking Clothing Fasteners", not "Athletic Shoes With Velcro™ Fasteners".

A patent attorney should also avoid using words in the Title that merely identify the fact that the invention is novel. The patent office regularly rejects use of the words "novel" and "improved" in the Title as being redundant. If the subject matter of the patent application were old (i.e., not novel or improved), it should not have been filed in the first place.

A final point is that numeration is important in the Title as elsewhere in the application. It is better to say that "Methods And Apparatus For Cleaning Teeth" than "Method And Apparatus For Cleaning Teeth".