First year associates at the law firm I use charge over $500/hr. Senior lawyers/partner cost well over $1,200/hour in 2021 at many of the largest / most successful firms now.
OK, you don't need any of those. Certainly you need lawyers to actually write the IPR & conduct it, but nothing starts until someone finds that killer prior art.
I find the profession prior art search firms; global, CPA, Cardinal, Nordic, etc. are pretty garbage. I always use one for my cases, but I, the attorney actually writing the IPR/invalidity contentions, have generally found the best art. The search firms get hung up on superficial similarities. So I wouldn't prevent your attorneys from doing some digging on their own.
But I wholeheartedly agree that you shouldn't start down the IPR road before you find the killer art (for all potential claims). I've seen to many instances of people rushing to file an IPR and then later finding better art.
I feel that's the case in many professions like plumber or car repair that people are reluctant or unable to DYI, whose services aren't going to be needed often, but that are accompanied by acute pain when they're needed. That tends to make people cost insensitive because they need pain relief, they have few points of comparison, and don't anticipate needing the same service again soon.
Sorry to say, but I'm not sure the IP law profession is different... I probably have worked with about a dozen attorneys hired by my employer to file patents on my behalf, and there were two lawyers that stood out a lot. They understood the inventions, what we claimed to set them apart from prior art, and produced filings that were relatively brief and to the point. The rest of them didn't really get the stuff, sent us draft filings that made me cringe because they were shallow copy-paste jobs, etc. If you're one of the better lawyers out there, I hope your clients are rewarding you appropriately for it!
Lawyers use very short abbreviations for everything. I love that about them. (This does relate to what you said; be patient!)
"pros" = "patent prosecution" that's what you're talking about. Writing the patent & getting it through the PTO.
"lit" - "litigation" A lit lawyer is quite different from a pros. They can switch back & forth, but it's a big switch.
"crim" - "criminal". You hear this one on the TV series "Billions" ("I want to be the head of Crim!")
"3L" - a third-year law student
Probably a lot of others I don't know.
One of the pros lawyers that Oracle used was a total copy-paste douchebag, like you said. At Packeteer we had an awesome guy, whom I brought in once a quarter to brainstorm our 2-3 filings that quarter (we did not have a big budget). I don't think he's doing pros anymore; it gets repetitive.
Most big companies want to use big law firms, regardless of whether their people are any good. As an independent lawyer you have to be really good to compete for that business.
First off, we provide folks with everything they need to apply for a business bank account in the first place: LLC, EIN. We also offer a US address + US phone number if that is something people want us to help them with too!
From there our philosophy is we do not force customers to use any particular banking option. With the above, you technically can open a bank account at any bank.
However, only certain banks allow non-US residents without a US SSN to 1) apply and 2) apply without visiting the US. Mercury is one example of this (well the only example I know of as of now :) ).
We are more than happy to provide links and requirements of other banks which we do for customers but when people (especially non-US residents) find out they have to fly to the US to open an account then that bank isn't really an option.
It's actually quite unusual to be making 3-5 payments over £25k in a typical week. Not saying it isn't a real problem for you, but I suspect only a very small fraction of potential users will be bothered by that particular point of friction.
It's probably a safe assumption that they use a similar style elsewhere though, so probably better to just change PHP version rather than edit the source files?
I could be wrong, (I'm a Python guy - not PHP), just seems a safe assumption that it's likely not the only spot.
I agree, getting that initial user base is always tricky. After that, things kinda perpetually keep themselves going.
Especially when you're likely talking about interesting topics / questions people google for. It seems in recent years that going has favored articles over forum topics in their results, but I'm sure there's still plenty of search traffic that goes to forums to bring in new users.
