Legal Question in Business Law in New York

Re: patents

Nolo Press publishes step-by-step brochures and books that may enable

a non-lawyer to patent her (or his) own invention without a lawyer. (Nolo Press and other similar publishers publish materials on many other legal subjectes such as bankruptcy and incorporation and divorce and landlord/tenant law which are published with the goal of assisting non-lawyers to handle their own legal matters without lawyers including representing themselves in court.)

For example,check out the LawGuru Bookstore link on this website.

The PTO (Patent and Trademark Office) also maintains its own Internet website and you may be able to get some useful information there.

However, a word of caution. Remember the old saying "penny wise and pound foolish" :

The money you save by not paying attorney fees may be far less than the money you lose in the long run by a costly mistake of missing out on some important detail that ultimately prevents you from getting the patent at all, or from getting as extensive patent rights as you might otherwise have gotten.

These books and brochures and websites no matter how well written, may be made obsolete by changes in the laws; moreover, these books and brochures, however, well-written and generally accurate, cannot cover every conceivable scenario or set of circumstances, and however appropriate the instructions they give may be in general, they may not be appropriate for your particular circumstances.

Moreover, such books can be misapplied or misunderstood by a user who is not a lawyer and who is without legal training.

Re: patents

You can patent your own inventions, but you will need to pay a lot of attention to detail and should probably look at some similar patents as examples. Only a licensed patent attorney can patent other people's inventions.

Re: patents

You can file your own patent application. However, drafting patent claims takes good skills and practice. Your patent will be as good as your claims and therefore if your claims are weak, you will have a weak patent. If your claims are defective, your patent will be defective. That is one of the reasons for hiring a patent attorney.