Truths About Contingency Fee Patent Attorneys

By Jocelyn Davidson


For those of you who do not know what a contingency fee is, this means that when you hire a lawyer and you get the results that you wanted, only then will you pay a fee. It is also called a conditional fee in some parts of the world. Meaning, if the client loses the case and has not recovered any settlement fee or payment for damages or injuries, there is a chance that the attorney working on the case will not get paid.

There are different kinds of cases in the field. And the privilege of a contingency fee is only applicable to some and to others, it has to be agreed upon. Generally contingency fee patents attorneys are not applicable despite many inventors thinking that they can guarantee a conditional agreement. But in obtaining a patent for an invention, all of the attorneys do not settle for a contingency fee.

The agreement can benefit both sides in a different kind of case. But in patent cases, attorneys are always at the losing side. So they make sure that they could guarantee they get paid for their services first. There is a certain complication on patent cases that most lawyers do not, in any condition, accept a contingency fee.

The way lawyers see it, the whole process of applying for a patent is very uncertain. There is no assurance that the result would be favorable to the client or not. The other variables in the whole process cannot be controlled and the decision of the patent examiner is something that cannot be predicted. When most lawyers tell inventors that they do not do contingency agreements, there are some unfavorable responses. But that is just how it is.

Aside from the fact that the payment would depend on the success of the trial or not, in patent cases, there has to be a financial stability and the invention must become a hit in the market before the payment will be given. However, there will never be no guarantee that it would fare well with the public. The uncertainty that this brings to attorneys is uncomfortable enough to only settle for the regular cost of their services.

The fact alone that there is chance the services will not be compensated is enough to make attorneys think many times about it. The effort and work that is given to the draft of the application alone already consumes so much time. And if inventors would ask professionals to help them without the assurance of payment, that would not seem fair at all.

TV commercials saying that an attorney would work on a case on a contingency basis can sometimes be misleading. Most of these attorneys are those who are working on personal injury cases. If not, these are the ones who are sure that the legal process they would be spending time with would have enough financial settlement to cover for a conditional payment.

If you are an inventor and you are planning on applying for a license for the what you have created, you have to be properly informed about this. You might think that, there are attorneys who would agree on contingency fees. You would be wasting your time if you are looking for someone in the field like this.

Making sure that the creation is a hit cannot be determined by the grant of a copyright. Which is why attorneys do not have contingency arrangements when they are handling these cases. If in case, you lose, it would turn out that they have worked for free.




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