Prof John Rizvi, Esq., Patent Attorney
In The Golden Age of Inventing, Our New Headquarters Offers Bulletproof Patent Protection For Small, Independent Inventors Across The World!
After almost two decades in rented office space we kept outgrowing, I am proud to announce that my law firm has relocated to a brand new 10,000 square foot office building recently.
Effective immediately, please send all mail to our new office address at 10394 W Sample Rd Suite 201, Coral Springs, FL 33065 and note that all appointments will be at this new location.
If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It!
I still remember being a young associate at Fish & Neave in New York City over 20 years ago.
If you do not know this patent law firm, they are to patents and inventing what Muhammad Ali is to boxing – the greatest of all time.
This is the law firm that represented Thomas Edison with the invention of the lightbulb, Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, Henry Ford with the automobile and the Wright brothers with the invention of the airplane.
So I joined Fish and Neave and settled in well at the firm, I was learning from the best patent lawyers in the world and making more money than I had ever seen in my life.
Something was missing. It took me 5 years at Fish & Neave to find out what it was.
And It was this…
“I want to represent the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of this world before they become Apple® & Microsoft®”.
I became a patent attorney to work with inventors. Instead I found myself day after day, in meeting after meeting with lawyers and MBAs at institutions and multi-national companies. Moving paper around and far removed from the creative streak of innovation that had led me to become a patent attorney in the first place.
My dream was to quit and start my own patent law firm focusing on early-stage ideas. The “garage inventor” is my hero. My passion is to represent the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of this world before they became Apple ® & Microsoft®.
But I was scared. It’s hard to quit when you’re at the top. Leaving the prestige and stability of Fish & Neave to go out on my own seemed like jumping off a cliff.
Until one evening I mustered up the courage to speak to my wife, Saba, about quitting. I recalled this day recently during a speech before the Broward County Bar Association:
“Honey, I want to quit my job and go out on my own."
"We have no savings. I had no clients, no revenues, no staff, and no office. And huge student loans to pay back.” -Will you trust me with taking this chance?
PROF. JOHN RIZVI, ESQ. // Board Certified Patent Attorney
I looked over at my wife. Big 3rd trimester stomach. And I prepared for all HELL to break loose. And do you know what she said?
She said to “GO FOR IT”….and told me that in her mind NOTHING I DO is “taking a chance”.
One of the greatest blessings in this world is to be married to someone that believes you can do anything. It is a curse also, but that is a topic for another day!
Dare Mighty Things
SO with my wife behind me, I DID IT.
I went to work the next day and shared my dream of quitting to form my own patent firm…now, people leave Fish & Neave to become chief patent counsel at companies like Motorola, Exxon, and IBM.
They don’t leave to start their own firm.
“You’re nuts”, they said. “You are crazy”. “John! This is career suicide’.
And the harshest sting of all – “we’ll hold onto your resume for when you come crawling back”.
I quit and never went back.
Risk Generates Reward
When I resigned, Fish & Neave told me that it was a risky proposition and warned me there was no stability in a small law firm.
In an ironic twist of fate, Fish & Neave dissolved several years later and today the firm no longer exists and are a historical footnote.
My small law firm, on the other hand, 18 years later, is still going strong and has grown beyond my wildest expectations.
Below is the “office” where I launched the firm 20 years ago and we began the amazing journey of transforming inventor’s lives one patent at a time. The house was not even mine.
It was my parent’s home and I worked out of a spare bedroom with the firm’s IT infrastructure being limited to my laptop and a cellphone. The cellphone, by the way, was a “brick” and nothing like the smartphones of today.
From those humble beginnings, I set out to transform the lives of my clients through protecting their innovative ideas.
I believe that my reason for being born in this world is to rid inventors of the feeling that they are not enough and that they have no chance inventing a new product because they are outsiders to an industry.
My passion is representing the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of this world before they become Apple® and Microsoft®.
The Patent Professor® of Today
Today, I’m proud to say my firm, The Patent Professor®, has grown into an unbelievable team of attorneys, engineers, industrial designers, illustrators, paralegals and legal staff that are second to none in the industry.
As I carefully grow my team, I have hand-picked a group of gifted mavericks that are passionate about the world of inventing. I want to lead a team that gets goose bumps just thinking about helping inventors achieve their dreams.
In the movie, Any Given Sunday, Al Pacino played a football coach (Tony D’Amato) in a wonderful locker-room motivational speech telling his players to keep playing even when everything seems stacked against them and fight for every inch they can get.
“An inch can mean the difference between victory and defeat”, pleaded Al Pacino in the movie, “and if you want to win in football or in life, you have to give it all you have for those inches.”
Like a deed in real estate, a patent stakes out the scope of property defined. If an attorney claims your invention too broadly, the patent is likely to be rejected. If he drafts claims that are too narrow, you are leaving money on the table. Precision is important but so is aggressive prosecution.
Our law firm is aggressive about fighting for those inches of intellectual real estate for our clients.is positioned to offer a degree of personalized service and to the innovator which other firms simply cannot match.
Our newly purchased 10,000 Square Foot Building
Why Move?
World-class service requires first-class facilities. The brand new 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs allows The Patent Professor ® to provide a unique combination of patent professionals all under one roof that is unlike that of any other small law firm.
We have all the services necessary to create, amend and successfully defend patent applications in one place.
From intellectual property attorneys and technical engineers to gifted artists specializing in patent illustrations to former patent examiners, everyone on my staff is singularly focused on patents.
We Live and Breathe Patents
I often say that if you do not think about patents in the shower, you should go get “a regular job” elsewhere.
PROF. JOHN RIZVI, ESQ. // Board Certified Patent Attorney
But do we really need all these different skill sets under one roof?
In a word, yes—and I’ll gladly explain why.
An Adversarial System, and Switching Sides
Like much of U.S. law, patent law is an “adversarial” system in which the inventor and the examiners (i.e. – at the Patent Office, these are essentially like “judges” in a regular court) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are working at cross purposes.
The innovator wants their invention to have the widest reach and broadest protection possible. The patent examiners are the judges who determine what does and doesn’t get patented, and they look for any legal reason they can find to reject the patent application.
Failing that, they seek to limit and restrict the innovator’s rights as narrowly as they can.
The patent lawyer is, at least nominally, the bridge between the inventor and the USPTO, translating the inventor’s idea into language the USPTO recognizes and the USPTO’s decrees into plain English.
Because of the adversarial nature of patent law, any error in a patent application or the supporting documents or any weakness on the attorneys part in pushing for claim coverage where it is justified can derail a patent, with potentially disastrous results.
Something as simple as a single letter in a patent application has resulted in a denial of rights. There is no room for error in the high stakes game of securing intellectual property.
One of the key points which sets The Patent Professor® apart from most law firms is that we are fortunate to have not one, but two former patent examiners on our staff.
These are highly qualified patent judges who have switched teams from working as a governmental employee to joining the inventor’s side of the scales.
These people know what the Patent Office looks for in an application and the supporting documents, and both common and arcane reasons why these documents either succeed or fail before the examiners.
Having access to their intimate knowledge and understanding of the Patent Office’s inner workings is a huge advantage for our clients, and one which few other law firms can legitimately claim.
The Art of Patent Illustrations
A patent application requires a detailed set of drawings that show the novel features and advantages of the invention. These illustrations must meet specific patent office regulations which are extremely stringent and unforgiving.
The skillset required to produce persuasive and examiner-friendly illustrations is part art and part science and is far removed from the typical wheelhouse of services that most patent attorneys are capable of providing in-house.
In fact, almost all patent law firms outsource the drawings to outside contractors. While this practice helps save money on payroll and office space and other overhead, it also often leads to delays, communication setbacks, misunderstandings and even outright rejection of the patent application. Not exactly a winning proposition for the attorney or their clients, is it?
A Full-time In-house Patent Illustration Department within Our Law Firm
At The Patent Professor ®, we have the nearly unique capability to provide all of our patent drawings in-house.
This means rather than outsourcing patent application drawings and trying to explain what is needed over the phone or email, with the inherent risks and delays associated with these methods of communicating, the attorney can simply walk down the hall to the illustrator’s office and explain the drawings the application requires.
This saves time and allows for a more streamlined, “hands-on” application process which garners better results with less hassle, stress and unnecessary red tape.
Come Grow with Us!
From a “crazy” idea and my parents’ spare bedroom to our new 10,000 Square Foot Building, the guiding ethos at The Patent Professor ® has always been to keep the interests and success of the innovator and their ideas uppermost in mind.
It is this principle and the machinery backing it which has contributed to our overwhelming success and that of our clients, and I am deeply proud of every member of my staff and their assistance in our ongoing pursuit of excellence for the brilliant and creative slice of the world that we serve.
Today, our handpicked team of attorneys, patent examiners, illustrators, paralegals and support staff afford us the ability to serve innovators in ways most intellectual property attorneys can only dream of, with a hands-on approach which ensures even the smallest details are addressed as early as possible.
Now I’d like to invite you to come grow with us and help us celebrate the culmination of almost 20 years of striving to be the best patent law firm anywhere.
When we work on an application, our motto is:
Good is Not Good Enough If It Can Be Better. Better is Not Good Enough If It Can Be The Best.
If this is what you want in your patent firm, we are all ears.
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