Q: Could you recommend which lawyer is more experienced for reservoir simulation area patent application?
I am in Houston and want to apply a patent for a new method of simulation of well performance in fractured reservoirs. I am wondering whether or not you have any experience or successful cases about patent application in methods for reservoir simulation in fractured reservoirs. Thanks!
A:
I can give you some help, but you won't find the answer totally satisfying.
1) Good news -- you can work with a competent patent attorney from anywhere. You do not have to use the patent attorney that is in your state. This is because the patent registration is granted by the Federal government and allows anyone with that registration to help folks obtain US patents.
2) Bad news -- you may not be able to pick the few attorneys with the best experience in this area. If they have already filed patents very similar to what you want to patent, then they are qualified and would be efficient -- but they would be unable to take on the work if it presented a conflict with the other clients in that space. As a general rule, a patent attorney should avoid representing two clients that are competitors. This gets tricky and many really big firms split hairs very finely so that they can take on as many clients as possible. It may be that they take the risk of a malpractice suit as a cost of doing business.
3) Partially good news -- what you can do is search for folks that have navigated patent applications to issue by doing a patent search. Through the use of the patent search you should at least learn of the analogous patents and at least the firms. If the patent does not list the individual attorney, you can use Public PAIR (explained in the slide set) to see who did the work by looking a the signatures on the papers that were filed.
Getting patents for software that analyzes data can be tricky these days because of recent Supreme Court cases Alice and Bilski (and others). So you need someone that files a fair amount of patents in this space.
Slide set is here http://bit.ly/Patent_Searching
I hope this helps.
Kevin E Flynn
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