Legal Question in Legal Malpractice in California
My company hired a patent attorney to file a patent application for a new online business system. They system had already been launched publicly (by a few months) when we hired the patent attorney (a fact he was aware of). The process of drafting the application took longer than we thought. The attorney ended up sitting on the completed patent application for no reason and filing it a year and 2 days after we had publicly launched the service. We did not know there was a requirement that the patent application had to be filed within one year of the invention being publicly disclosed (we were never told by the patent attorney). The examiner rejected our application in large part due to this problem. What kind of case do we have against our former patent attorney?
1 Answer from Attorneys
Well, as always, a brief blurb from one side always sounds like a winning case. The one thing you don't mention is damages. Nominal damages are available for legal malpractice, but obviously $1 of damages is not worth suing over.