Our team builds wealth for our Clients by providing world-class Intellectual Property (IP) services.  We share responsibility, opportunity, and success as a team.  We treat our relationships with our Clients, our suppliers, and each other with attention and care.  We expand Client expectations.  We balance our lives while developing exceptional expertise.

A patent protects a new and unobvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter.  Patents can protect computer systems, both hardware and hardware in combination with software, that support securities products, insurance, financial services, and exchange trading.

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).  Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees.  U.S. Patent Grants are effective only within the United States, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions.  Under certain circumstances, patent term extensions or adjustments may be available.

The right conferred by the Patent Grant is, in the language of the statute, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

Three types of patents

1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, composition of matter or any new and useful improvement thereof.

2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original and ornamental design for an article of manufacture.

3) Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents, or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

What can be patented? The patent law specifies the general field of subject matter that can be patented and the conditions under which a patent may be obtained.

Any person who “invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent” if they follow the legal requirements for doing so.  While laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable subject matter, particular applications in devices, systems, and methods may be patentable subject matter.