Which firms are the fastest at patenting?
Attempting to get a patent is an expensive endeavor. There are both fees that have to be paid to the US patent office and the high billing rates associated with lawyers. Today we investigate one way of trying to keep these costs down: finding the lawyers that get patents the fastest.
Ideally a patent is granted quickly by an examiner and there is little back and forth between the patent office and your lawyer. Unfortunately other times there is a longer debate which each side going back and forth incurring more fees from the patent office and more billable hours to your attorney. This deliberation also delays the patent being granted — on the order of several months.
Thus, if we can identify the lawyers that are prosecuting patents the fastest, we can infer that they are less expensive then their slower peers. Additionally we can segment lawyers based on their specialty and their current position — Is it better for me to work with a large firm or an independent lawyer?
Below is a box and whisker plot showing how many months it takes for various lawyers to get a patent. The data is segmented to show the average for all lawyers, those that work independently, and then the top six most filing firms since 2001.
As the chart shows, the median amount of time for get a patent granted is 36 months. Independent lawyers tends to be slightly faster, at 33 months, and the large firms are slightly slower at 38 to 42 months.
This gives us a baseline for understanding the averages for all granted patents. But what about specific technologies? Ideally I’m finding the fastest lawyer for me and my technology. Let’s segment once more — showing how fast different firms work with different technologies.
Three areas of technology that have seen many patent applications in recent months are:
- Modulated-carrier systems.
- Digital computing adapted for specific functions.
- Medicines that contain organic ingredients.
Lets dive into how these firms compare against one another:
Modulated-carrier systems
After narrowing in on this segment we can see a lot more skew in the data showing how some firms are just faster than others. A few of the large firms can take a year or longer than the median to successfully grant a patent. In this case we can see Fish Richardson leading the pack and beating out the average by a full 9 months.
Digital computing adapted for specific functions
With digital computing we see a much more even spread, similar to the global averages. While Fish Richardson is still the fastest when it comes to patenting this technology its lead is not a significant.
Medicines that contain organic ingredients
In our final example we see an interesting twist — Independent Lawyers are out performing the larger firms by a pretty significant degree. Not only is their median time to a grant faster than the others, but their 95th time percentile is also far lower than the average and other firms.
So what can we learn from all of this?
First off we can see that when given a specific technology different firms are faster than others at getting a grant. The first two technologies presented were more high-tech based and showed Fish Richardson being faster than others. This quickness can be roughly correlate to less billable hours and less fees to the patent office — they are probably the cheaper option to choose when inventing with either of those technologies.
On the other hand, we saw that Independent Lawyers were generally faster than firms at getting patents around medicine, and therefore potentially cheaper in the long run.
Arming inventors with this knowledge enables them to more effectively find the lawyer that is the fastest for them. While this is just one component in the many different factors that come into play when finding a lawyer it’s one that does have long term consequences.
