This is a true story. As they say, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. One day a client was referred to me who had filed a patent that had not been searched. The patent application was about to be examined by the patent office. I was contacted by a firm who wanted the patent evaluated .
When I reviewed the prior art patents in the same class as the invention (a step which would have been performed in a proper patent search), I quickly found a classic error. The application had been written as if the inventor had invented the very first "widget". This often happens when an inventor who has never seen anything like his invention files a patent application without looking into what has been invented before (the prior art).
[See my earlier post about 10 common mistakes inventors make].
The inventor was already selling his widget and it was selling well because it was better than the other widgets in the marketplace. The reason it was better was because at had a unique feature the other widgets did not.
But, the patent application that had been written did not describe this unique feature of the inventors widget, it was written to claim all the invention of widget's. If the application had been examined by the patent office at that point the application would have been rejected in its entirety.
What actually happened was different. When error was discovered the patent application was rewritten by a new patent attorney (at significant additional cost to the inventor). The new attorney did his best but because the invention was already in use, he was not able to make the strongest claims to the truly unique features of this invention.
So the inventor may have saved money by not doing a patent search but he lost far more than he saved in having a weaker patent than he might have obtained , and spending additional money for rewriting the application. In the words of the proverb "A stitch in time saves nine".
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