Too Many Cooks: Inventorship an Increasing Problem for Patent Counsel

Patent attorneys are noting an uptick in inventorship issues within their practices. At present, the law states that only those who have made independent, conceptual contributions to an invention can be named as an inventor. If improper information is listed on a patent, it can be invalidated if the inventorship isn’t correct.

Managing Intellectual Property spoke with Finnegan partner Mark Feldstein and he said generics companies frequently claim that there are inventorship issues with innovator businesses’ patents.

“It seems to be a standard attack to try to invalidate innovator patents in the pharma area,” he said.

Mark hasn’t advised patent owners in cases where the other side was able to invalidate the patents based on improper inventorship. But it can still be an important issue, he said.

As a result, he focuses on inventorship in the pre-litigation preparation and makes sure to correct it if there’s a problem.

“It has really affected how much time and effort we spend looking at inventorship pre-litigation,” he said.

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