When an invention disclosure submission crosses the desk of an in-house intellectual property attorney, the next step is often to determine if the product is patentable and, if it is, whether a patent application should be filed. But sometimes there's another consideration—patent application quotas for legal departments. For one former in-house patent attorney from cosmetics company L'Oréal USA Inc., this was an added consideration that allegedly got him fired.

Performance metrics for in-house counsel around patent applications aren't as rare as some might expect, which may raise the question of how to balance quotas with professional ethical obligations, according to in-house and outside IP counsel.

In 2014, L'Oréal SA had an annual global quota of 500 patent applications and a quota of 40 patent applications for its U.S. research division in Clark, New Jersey, according to a 2015 lawsuit filed by Steven Trzaska, the company's former vice president and head of patents and business development. The whistleblower lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, claimed that Trzaska was fired after advising his superiors that he would not, for the sake of meeting the quota, violate his ethical obligations as an attorney by filing applications for products that were not patentable.