IN MANY WAYS, inventors and patent lawyers are opposites. The inventor is a dreamer-a creative, visionary person. The lawyer must be practical, and is all too aware of the need to follow rules and meet deadlines. Inventors are optimists. They genuinely believe their ideas will improve the world. Preparing for the worst is a lawyer’s job.
But when inventors and patent lawyers click, they can forge enduring relationships that showcase the ingenuity of the attorneys and also allow the inventors to reap maximum value from their ideas. What makes such a relationship click Four different inventors, from a MacArthur genius grant recipient to a small-town engineer working in his garage, came up with remarkably similar answers. It all comes down to communication-speaking the same language, understanding how the other thinks.
