Legal Question in Intellectual Property in North Carolina

Re: Can I help a colleague with a provisional patent application?

YES and NO.

You may help the colleague but you may not give legal advice, such as any assurance that the documents are in order. You may not communicate with the PTO or represent the colleague in any way before the PTO. You may not in any way infer you are qualified to advise any person concerning patent office procedure or patent law. Whether you charge a fee or do it for free generally makes little difference as to whether you are engaging in the unauthorized practice of law, but charging a fee is an aggravating factor which normally will increase the sanctions if you are caught.

Aside from the restrictions on you due to lack of having been examined and licensed to practice before the USPTO, you have a serious fraud problem in passing yourself off as qualified to assist an inventor for a fee. If anything goes wrong due to faulty advice on your part, you will be personally liable for actual damages, and probably for punitive damages. Judges, who are lawyers, are not easy on make-believe lawyers.

You may also run afoul of the American Inventors Protection Act if you are being paid to evaluate the invention or assist in its promotion and are not making the required affirmative disclosures, and that failure carries a $5,000 statutory damage that may be trebled if fraud exists. My advice is that, for your own protection and peace of mind, even if you assist the person, have him go to a real patent attorney (not just a patent agent) with the papers before they are submitted and have them reviewed and the overall strategy reviewed.

I would suggest that getting advice from a patent attorney is not just the "gold standard", but the minimum standard. You wouldn't operate on your colleague's brain and you should not operate on the colleague's "brainchild" either. It is just too dangerous for both you and your colleague.