You’re likely viewing this page because you’re in the midst of deciding which law firm or attorneys you want to help you get a patent, register a trademark or copyright, or deal with litigation matters. There are a lot of options out there: big law firms that have name clout and charge more money; small firms without the name recognition, but which provide potentially as good or better service for less money; solo practitioners; and even invention companies.
We offer two main reasons why we think you should choose Fish IP Law™ services.
What does that mean? Inside counsel is the term for lawyers that a company hires on staff to represent their interests. When a company lawyer offers counsel, he/she does so with the company’s interests in mind, because that’s who signs the paycheck.
An outside attorney also has his own interests at heart: paying rent, insurance, salaries, etc.; to some extent, those interests compete with those of his/her client’s.
Our philosophy at Fish IP Law is to operate as if we were your employees. We’ll tell you if we don’t think filing a patent application makes commercial sense. If we think litigating is a bad idea, we’ll tell you. We work for you. You don’t work for us.
In practice, this comes down to transparency. We want you to understand as much as possible, and be part of the process as it is happening. There is no Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain.
The main goal of intellectual property is to put a road block, or at least a speed bump, in the path of the competition. So if the goal is the road block, why not start with the question “What do you want to prevent competitors from doing?”. In the patent world, for example, that is quite different from asking the question “What did you invent?”. One would think you would get to the same answer, but that’s not always the case. In practice, the effect of asking the first question is that we end up filing broader patent applications, with greater commercial relevance. It also means we often do significant prior art and other searching before moving forward with an application. And yes, that sometimes means saving our clients a lot of money and heartache, by not pursuing something that would very likely produce no meaningful commercial advantage. Business people get this immediately, and so do we.