How does an inventor know if the claims that a patent attorney wrote for his invention are any good?
We do not have an answer for you. Our basic response would be to question your patent attorney before you hire him. Listen to his responses. Does the attorney seem like he takes the claims portion of a patent application seriously. Ask him/her how much time it takes to draft a set of claims. If he/she indicates it can be done in a couple of hours, you can rest assured that the claims will probably not be very good. If you prospective patent attorney says he can draft an entire application for $3000 and his hourly rate is $225 or more, you can be confident he is not going to spend more than a few hours on the claims. In our opinion to draft three really good sets of claims (you can have up to three independent claims in your application for the basic filing fee) takes around 6-8 hours. And incidentally, the shorter the length of the claims, the better they are likely to be. Long claims with a lot of additional language are almost always too narrow!
