The IP Factor

Once again, Dun & Bradstreet have published their Patent Attorney Ratings. Once again, the Reinhold Group heads off the table with their stable of 24 Patent Attorneys, G. A. Ehrlich is in 2nd place with 16 Patent Attorneys, followed by Luzzatto et Luzzatto with 13, Perl Letzer Cohen Tzedek with 13 and Stanford T. Colb with 12. JMB & Co. and Mark Freedman each have 8.
It begs the question whether D & B are so facile and infantile in their “analysis” of other fields?
D & B also quote Israel Patent Office statistics regarding number of patents filed locally, number of patents filed in Israel on behalf of local clients, and the technological breakdown of patents filed and patents issued. Since these statistics are all cribbed from the Israel Patent Office website, we shan’t bother to detail them here.
We would suggest that D & B check out how many of the 210 patent attorneys still paying their licence fees are clinically dead, how many are fully retired, and how many work one day or less a week. Several of the ‘patent attorneys’ that contribute to the statistics are lawyers that received their license in 1967 when the Patent Law passed, as they practiced in IP. This despite the fact that they had never and still have never written a patent application.
More than one patent attorney listed as working for one or other of the larger companies is actually working full time for someone else, or has set up his own firm. Nevertheless, many of the bigger firms wave their D & B rating around as if it was the indication of quality.
Another daft but widely quoted statistic is that Israel files more PCT applications, per capita, per year, than any other country. This fact is often tied together with the inane song about the Jewish head inventing loads of patents. Actually, the reason for this phenomenon has nothing to do with the quality of Israeli inventions, but everything to do with the fact that Israel has a small local market but preferential trade relations with both the US and Europe. Both US and European companies have local markets of hundreds of millions of consumers. This is two orders of magnitude larger than the Israeli home market. Since almost any reasonable Israeli technology will pursue patent protection in both the US and Europe, economic considerations make use of the PCT system advisable.
On a personal note, I drafted and filed 36 out of the 2356 patent applications filed locally in 2005, which represents 1.5% of all local patents filed. This is not bad when there are some 210 patent attorneys locally, and at least some of the inventors filed without professional assistance or used a lawyer – which is probably worse. This makes me over three times more productive than the average Israel patent attorney!
I also did some first filings in the US where the client had published his invention, or where some other reason justified this more expensive option. Some Israeli Patent Attorneys specialize in computer patents and routinely do their first filings in the US.