How do I know if a patent is worth the costs required to maintain it?

Text Transcript

David Roberts, Intellectual Property Attorney: So the cost of patent acquisition and maintenance is a common question that we get from our clients. One of the things to think about, though, is why you’re paying that in the first place. So you always need to tie your payment or your investment in that maintenance fee to some sort of return that the company is getting. The most natural thing to look at is what’s your revenue relationship with that patented idea? The second thing, though, to think about would be your perception as a market leader, or maybe needing to maintain that patent as an asset to leverage in a negotiation in the future.

There’s a lot of factors to think about as to whether you want to keep that patent or not, but the why question is one thing that a lot of companies don’t think to answer at the outset. Really the value that someone externally can bring to the assessment is an unemotional take on whether that patent is really returning value or not. Too often we see companies that have invested a lot of time and resources and maybe have some key personnel that like to have that patent protection in place, and they do so, but really don’t have a strong business reason for keeping that protection in place.