They’re like popsicles.

I in no way want to demine the industry of law when I say attorneys are like popsicles. What I’m really saying is that, like popsicles, they come in many flavors.

Most inventors are familiar with the patent attorney because they often run down that road first with their shinny new idea. Within this austere group of professionals there are vast spreads of price scales. These scales are based largely on the level of clients the attorney normally works with and the price the “market” of those clients will bear.

For example – an inventor recently contacted a university for help. She was referred by the university to the attorney who does their patent work. At $70,000.00 for three utility patents it’s safe to say the attorney was at the top end of the scale. In fact, some attorneys gouge universities with fees far above the normal market value. This attorney was not about to change the fee structure for this inventor, they simply billed at their normal rate and although the lady was trying to help –what she did was start the inventor off on the wrong track.

Those same patents in a 25^th floor firm downtown would have been about $45,000.00 and from a single person shop maybe $8,000.00 to $10,000.00 – still expensive, but not the $23,000.00 each the inventor paid.

It’s the excitement and validation that often keeps the inventor from acting on the common sense that guides us through life.   Emotions are the blinders an inventor wears that allows us to spend $70,000.00 without comparing the services and prices the way we would if we were buying a new computer.

In the end no one did anything wrong, not the lady at the university, not the inventor, not even the attorney. It was simply a convergence of miss matched circumstances that made a difficult process much more painful.