Formal Patent Drawings

Bay Area Intellectual Property Group provides a patent drawing service as part of its patent practice and as a stand-alone service for clients using another firm to draft/prosecute their patent.  Our stand-alone formal drawing service is described in some detail below. 

What sets our patent drawing service apart?

Unlike most firms who employ non-technical CAD operators or graphic artist, Bay Area IP’s patent drawing professionals are all degreed engineers with solid professional and technology backgrounds.  When practical and appropriate, we prefer to have the same patent practitioner handling your case also draft your formal patent drawings because we find that for all but the simplest drawings, it often takes more billable time and is more error prone to communicate to a separate draftsperson- especially a non-technical one- than if your patent practitioner performed the formal drawing him or her self.

Your formal drawings are made available to you using the latest technology thereby providing convenience and efficiency benefits such as previewing via Adobe PDF files, and CD-ROM archival files saved in many common formats of sufficiently high quality for last minute printing/submission to the receiving patent office if necessary.

For maximal efficiency, Bay Area IP uses the most common and advanced software packages including the following:

Visio, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Acrobat; AutoCad 2002; MS PowerPoint, and Word.

Further, Bay Area IP uses online technologyto save you and your clients valuable time and money.  Among other capabilities, it allows you to markup drawings online and transmit revisions to us electronically.  By avoiding FAXing, version tracking, and delays related to physical delivery we increase the quality and speed of our patent drawing service.  Through efficient online meetings with one of our patent/drawing professionals, we often can more quickly converge on an accurate final product than by getting feedback iteratively through expensive overnight mail.  Sometimes a virtual face-to-face meeting is the best way to efficiently resolve questions or misunderstandings, thereby avoiding travel expense, lost time, and scheduling problems.  In addition, all data transferred online in a secure conference call and email is secure by advanced encryption technology.

Cost Reduction Program

As a service to our clients we offer a relatively unique opportunity for you to reduce your patent application costs whereby if you submit preliminary electronic drawings that are of sufficient quality to save us time, we will work from your electronic drawings to create formal drawings, thereby reducing your per sheet costs.  We will inform you after we receive your preliminary drawings what your least costly option is, and what maximum price per sheet you can expect.  It is our experience that a savings off our standard per sheet rate may be realized about 30% of the time.  To increase the likelihood and amount of realized savings, you are encouraged to reference USPTO drawing guidelines when preparing your preliminary drawings. 

If you can produce drawings that satisfy the USPTO formal drawing requirements then we will only charge a minimal review and processing feeinstead of the normal per page formal drawing fee.  However, if the drawings you submit are not in condition for submission as formal drawings to the USPTO, we will charge an hourly fee to correct the defects.  The USPTO formal drawing requirements are relatively strait forward and we can fix most simple defects quickly, usually at an overall savings to you.  However, in no case will the cost for us to fix your defective drawing exceed our standard per page formal drawing fee.

Modern software programs can import/export files in a variety of formats such that we can import your preliminary drawings into one of our in-house software applications.  If your drawings can not be exported in a format compatible any of our programs listed above you should contact us towards resolving the issue. 

Procedures

What follows below is a description of our standard patent drawing preparation procedure for our stand-alone drawing service.  If we are preparing you patent application, these procedures do not apply to you.  We are very flexible, however, to adapt our normal flow to your particular needs.

·       In descending order of prerence- by secure email, physical mail, or FAX.  To help avoid errors and save time, it is usually a good idea to include in your documentation submission relevant portions of the patent spec so that we can refer to it instead of having to contact you for various questions that may arise.

·       All submitted documentation is securely destroyed after you have approved the drawings.

·       Our standard lead-time for formal drawings is currently two weeks.  However, if you need faster service, please contact us promptly to see if we can accommodate your time frame.

·       After our initial review of your submissions, we will provide you with a price quote itemizing the pricing category (basic, standard, complex) of each drawing requested.

·       Typically, we email you Adobe Acrobat PDF drawing proofs for your review, but we can FAX or mail copies to you instead.  If you provide us with a public key, we will send your emailed drawings using PGP encryption for complete confidentiality.  We can also securely email your drawings to you by way of encrypted ZIP compression.