Intellectual Property Services


Intellectual Property (including patents, copyrights, and trade secrets) is a key barrier to entry in the emerging market. Because technical innovation is at the core of the emerging market value proposition, the value of these assets is dramatically higher than in Steady State markets, and they can profoundly influence early stage company valuations.

Ironically, it is precisely these early stage organizations for whom IP strategy is the hardest to implement, and ends up becoming a huge cost and resource pit while remaining a weak link in the overall corporate strategy. BlueCat Group has the experience in creating and implementing effective IP protection strategies to keep you out of the pit and deliver the clear, effective tool that IP is intended to be. We don’t displace the IP attorney, we facilitate the process and relationship. Our added value is derived from our ability to:

 
Demystify the patent process

 
Capture the "Big Picture" innovations

 
  Bridge the Engineer - Attorney communications gap

 
Control overall costs

 
 Improve your likelihood of success

 
 

Patent or Trade Secret? Provisional Patent or Utility Patent, and when? And how do I protect myself against the other guy? The guidance you are getting from your patent attorney may be legally precise, but it is completely uninformed by the business perspective. BlueCat Group consultants have the depth of IP experience to translate this vaguely comprehensible and indecisive (from a business view) guidance into crisp, actionable decision criteria. You know your business, financial, and product development imperatives, we can empower you to translate these into an IP protection strategy.

Engineers and Attorneys speak different languages, and seek to communicate to very different constituencies. BlueCat Group IP consultants speak the language of engineers AND the language of Patent Attorneys, and can dramatically reduce the pain and improve the efficiency with which information flows between these groups.

 
Interview your patent attorney to establish their preferred style

 
Collect and organize the supporting technical material

 
Prepare, or augment, diagrams

 
Create a complete patent draft, including a claims skeleton

 
Structured review with Engineering team

 
Field and facilitate the attorneys questions and requests

Engineers are often the most detailed oriented of folks. They are not satisfied until they understand the precise bits and bytes of a solution. As a result, when asked about the innovative aspects of a product, the answer generally focuses at the bottom, at the details of implementation in code or silicon.

However, the most effective patents are those that capture the innovation in the broadest conception, and build in a top down fashion from there. A patent portfolio that articulates and claims the innovation at the level of the “forest”, and then build downwards by connecting the dots of the individual trees of innovative implementation, provide you with the breadth of protection to serve as a meaningful barrier to your competition, and the depth to ensure enforceability.

BlueCat Group consultants know how to extract the forest AND the trees to give you the full benefit of your patent strategy.

Ineffective communication between Engineers and Patent Attorneys can result in endless revision cycles which consume your already overextended development team, and generate legal fees which spiral out of control. The BlueCat Group approach to IP controls the costs associated with patent filing by creating a structured process for extracting the technical materials from, and reviewing the patent proposal with, the development team, and then providing the material to the patent attorney in the form of a proto-patent draft and proposed claim structure. Confusion is minimized, and revision cycles correspondingly reduced.

Your patent process doesn’t end with filing the application. Two to three years later, the application will come up for review, and it’s claims must withstand scrutiny and possible challenges. Many patents are needlessly rejected, or substantially reduced in scope, as a consequence of their poor organization and articulation of the core innovation. Often, after the passage of several years since the application was filed, the inventors themselves are unclear about how to distinguish the invention from the prior art put forward by the examiner.

By approaching your IP in a top down fashion, the BlueCat Group IP process produces a patent application in which the core differentiating innovation is clearly stated so that the likelihood of misinterpretation by the examiner is reduced and, even after a gap of several years, challenges can be answered clearly and effectively.