Prepare Legal Nebraska Patents Forms For Free

Many inventors hire a patent attorney to help them navigate the application process, but this is not always necessary or worthwhile. Attorney fees tend to be very expensive, often costing more than the application fees. Some individuals and small businesses would prefer not to bear these extra costs.

The Patent Pro Bono Program attempts to match inventors with registered patent agents or patent attorneys. These practitioners volunteer their time without charging the inventor. However, the inventor still must pay all fees that are required by the USPTO; these cannot be paid by the practitioner.

The legal answer is, of course, yes. Thomas Jefferson filed his own patent application, as have many inventors over the last two centuries. The Patent Office was designed to be approachable and helpful to the individual inventor, especially in regard to provisional applications.

The cheapest way to get "Patent Pending" status is to file a provisional patent application. All that is required is a detailed description of the invention, an informal drawing, and a synopsis of how you came up with the idea. For small entities, the application fee is $130 and for large companies it is $260.

The theory behind the ?poor man's patent? is that, by describing your invention in writing and mailing that documentation to yourself in a sealed envelope via certified mail (or other proof-of-delivery mail), the sealed envelope and its contents could be used against others to establish the date that the invention was ...

A patent can cost from $900 for a do-it-yourself application to between $5,000 and $10,000+ with the help of patent lawyers. A patent protects an invention and the cost of the process to get the patent will depend on the type of patent (provisional, non-provisional, or utility) and the complexity of the invention.