Patent Law Practice Center

Maintaining low-quality patents isn’t a winning strategy

Getting whatever you can sneak by a patent examiner probably never was a wise strategy, but it is true that there was a time in the industry when patents were viewed as a numbers game. Once upon a time, the patent business viewed patent acquisition, whether by organic growth or outside purchase, as aking to a corporate version of global thermonuclear war. If you want to succeed, the thinking went, you needed to have more warheads (i.e., patents) than your enemies. At times, the quality of those patent assets were considered at best secondary, if not completely irrelevant.

While the size of a patent portfolio isn’t completely irrelevant, it is worse than useless to have a portfolio full of low-quality patents. Not only is there a growing cost associated with obtaining patents in the first place, but there is also a growing cost of keeping patents alive. The seldom told story in the popular press is that many patents do not enjoy the full patent term because there are three separate and increasing maintenance fee payments that must be made to keep the patent alive for its full term. Specifically, maintenance fees are due at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after a patent has issued. For a large entity, these fees are $1,600 for the first maintenance fee payment, $3,600 for the second, and $7,400 for the third.

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