Patent Attorney and Founder
We’re in a five-part series talking about intellectual property and specifically patent insurance. Yes, you heard me right, patent insurance. These days there’s insurance for everything, but yesterday we just introduced the idea. Today, I want to spend the whole session here talking about one specific policy that you can use to your benefit if you believe that there are going to be infringers or maybe there already are a few out there, and you want to make sure you protect the ability for you and your business to afford the legal fees that are going to be required in order to properly enforce all of your rights against those infringers.
When the process starts, when you first file your application, whether that’s a provisional or a non-provisional patent application, as soon as your attorney gets that filed for you, that’s when the conversation can start because you finally have an identifiable asset. You’re given a serial number, a patent application number as it were. You want to speak with a claims adjuster. This is a broker that works at an insurance company, and we have a few that we use here from Bold Patents, and we carefully chose them so that they understand the technology and appreciate the value of the clients that we serve.
The insurance broker will go over the different options, but for this first type of insurance policy I’m talking about today, we want to look at the IP infringement policy. So, this is the patent holder that wants to make sure that when they get their patents granted, they can afford to pay legal fees to litigate and properly enforce their rights on would-be infringers. The policy itself can range, of course, in how much it’s going to cost initially—a premium out-of-pocket premium to the individual or to the entity, depending on how much coverage they want.
So, that coverage discussion is probably the hardest one to make upfront. When it comes to certain industries, some are more cost-prohibitive than others, meaning it’s going to be more discovery, likely going to be harder to identify certain customers as it goes up the supply chain. It takes a lot of an in-depth analysis as far as what the technology is, so we can help you identify what a good range for coverage would be. Then, of course, there’s the discussion, like any other insurance, about what kind of deductible to choose—whether it’s five, ten, fifteen percent, how much out-of-pocket we need to come up with in order to get that coverage to take place.
If you have any questions about that insurance or starting this process, maybe you’ve already filed your application, give us a call.