Reply from Bay Area IP Group, llcSep 1, 2021
Steven, upon researching, we discovered that you were not telling a true story. You lack of understanding of patent and their process seems to be the source of all your unwarranted fears and jumping to wrong conclusions as to quality.
You said: “Another patent attorney confirmed my opinion. They said bayareaip made several mistakes, including simple wording and phrasing in my patent incorrect and would never be accepted by USPTO. Bayareaip got alot of the basics wrong.”
However, it was not your opinion or any attorney’s opinion, as it came from the USPTO Examiner’s review in the First office Action, where the Examiner found no quality problems at all in the specification, which is the most critical part of a patent. As we point out below, the Examiner pointed out a few trivial claims typos, which always get amended/corrected in the examination process. So, no big deal as you fear.
Things the Examiner cited like "comprise of" vs "comprising" have no harm in litigation as there meaning is obvious to those skilled in the art, so not a quality issue even if it was not caught and corrected. Also, note that you reviewed that and did not catch it either prior to filing.
Re quality, that is not what you said when we filed your case. You happily approved our final draft with “minor revisions”, and were pleased with the over 30 creative and patent strengthening questions/improvements we made to your original submission, with *no complaints* of errors/problems what-so-ever, and a year later you never replied to my email asking to back up your accusations. So, you are not being truthful when you say "I expressed my complaints."
Your case had no deadlines and you are wrong about what are actual quality issues in patents. We now see that what really happened is that a year later when the 1st OA came, you gave up on patenting your invention, as no response was ever filed letting your patent go abandoned, yet a few weeks beforehand you tried to change Power of Attorney to yourself, not another attorney. Looks likely you ran out of money or interest, and are lashing out your personal issues on us.
Your only legit gripe is the unfortunate delays to our work and communication problems- due to COVID lockdowns mandated in SF & out of our control. That is, unfortunately for everyone, San Francisco was ordered into COVID lockdown starting mid-march, which forced our offices to close, and put our human resources in a complete disarray from then on. As a result, we lost some key workers and our whole workflow got severely backlogged for most of that year, as it was near impossible to higher/train new workers. I see that that we finished our first draft work internally in April, yet lacking sufficient paralegals I see that it was not actually emailed to you until June. Based on your later revision, we got your our Final draft to you in August, and filed it soon after you approved and paid balance for filing. Obviously, this was an extraordinary pandemic situation we all were dealing with. Our normal turn times range from 1-2 months, not the 6 months you experienced. So, of course, is/was not our normal service, goal or original intention. Obviously, if this was not a one-off, fluke situation there would be literally 100s of similar angry clients posting one star complaints, not just yours.
You paid “Top” level, so if you did not get that, you would have complained back then, not a year later when some opportunistic attorney trying to get your new business tells you that it was a “low quality job” b/c “All claims are rejected” and a couple trivial typos in the claims. Anyone who knows anything about patent process knows that nearly all patent apps are initially rejected, and later get allowed upon proper legal responses/amendments.
As outlined above, what is really behind your laundry list of complaints and personal attacks is that you just gave up on your patent, as clearly stated in your 7/7/21 email where you simply said “I paid for the top...I’m disappointed…Every claim was rejected. My device is fairly simple…”
Re “I brought these issues to Bay Area IP”, that is not true. We asked you examples about what you mean and you never replied, then unfairly posted your Yelp flame on us.
Obviously, the root of it all is your extreme misunderstand what is patent quality and normal process, running out of money, which had you giving up, angry then prospected another attorney who played into your lack of knowledge/anger to get your office action response business.
So, of course, your complaints are not representative of our work, and “Bayareaip got alot of the basics wrong” is completely untrue, and our claims exactly matched the scope/structure you requested. Obviously, if it was, over our ~20 years, there would be literally 100s of similar angry clients posting one star complaints, not just yours.
Re drawings, our quote incl. 5 drawings; however, you submitted 15. We should have bill extra for the legal drafting work to cover that many extra drawings, @$100/ea. However, to help make up for of our delays, I let that go. Also, you are the one who had asked us to file with informal drawings, and never later asked us to formalize any drawings, b/c the USPTO accepted the informal one. We offered to formalize any 5 of the ones you select, but you never answered. So, more false understandings/representations from you.
Re your Personal Attacks, he goes by his short name b/c many people, like you in Kentucky, were having a hard time saying his foreign name. So, makes it easier for them. Obviously, I link to my USPTO reg. info on my bio page, so silly and mean spirited that you pretend I’m trying to be deceitful.
Also, we do not list last names of employees for the same reason you posted anonymously, b/c there are too many crazy & violent people these days to put our people at personal risk when simply doing their jobs.
While your frustration w/ our COVID related delays is very understandable, we are personally very disappointed that you did not have a true dialog with me/us before you irrationally and publicly reacted in anger to routine things that get easily favorably resolved in the normal process.
Kindly yours,
Abby
POC Senior Paralegal
