No new matter can be added to an application after the day it is filed.
That single rule decides how much a patent is worth. Two years into prosecution you will want to amend a claim, and whether you can depends entirely on what the specification already described.
Drawings from expired US patents. Lit: US 1,693,515, Marjorie S. Joyner, Permanent Waving Machine, filed and granted 1928.
The claims are what you own. The specification is what lets you keep them.
A patent protects exactly what its claims say. The specification exists to support those claims and to give you somewhere to retreat to when an examiner cites something close.
A specification that describes only the prototype in front of you leaves no room. One that also describes the alternatives, the ranges, and the variations a competitor would reach for lets a claim be narrowed precisely rather than abandoned.
You review a full draft before anything is filed, and we revise it with you. Inventors consistently know a detail that never made it into the disclosure, and that detail is often the claim that survives.
What drafting covers
- Independent and dependent claims built for the field you are in
- A specification carrying support for the amendments you will need
- Drawings prepared to USPTO standards
- A full draft you read, question, and approve before filing
- Provisional or non-provisional, whichever fits where the invention sits
Typically three to six weeks from the search result.
Questions we get about this.
How do you write a patent application?
A patent application has a specification describing the invention, drawings showing it, and claims defining what is protected. The claims are drafted first in practice, because everything else exists to support them.
The work is deciding what to claim and how broadly. Too narrow and a competitor designs around it; too broad and the prior art reads on it.
What happens if I leave something out of the application?
You cannot add it later. Anything not described on the filing date is new matter and cannot be introduced by amendment.
In practice that means a feature you forgot to mention is a feature you cannot fall back on when an examiner rejects your main claim. This is the most common reason an otherwise good invention ends up with a narrow patent.
Should I file a provisional or a non-provisional application?
A provisional holds a filing date for twelve months and lets you say patent pending, but it is never examined and never becomes a patent on its own. A non-provisional enters the examination queue.
A provisional helps when the invention is still moving or you are raising money. It works badly when it is used to postpone hard drafting decisions, because it only protects what it actually describes.
Can I write the application myself and have you review it?
We can review a draft, and sometimes that is the right arrangement. Be aware that reviewing a specification with a structural problem often costs more than drafting one, because the fix means rebuilding the disclosure rather than editing it.
If you have already filed a provisional you wrote yourself, bring it to us well before the twelve months run out.
Send us the disclosure, however rough.
Sketches and notes are enough. We will tell you what the application needs to describe and what it would take to draft it.