Jordan Becker Authors Article for Bloomberg Law - Patents, Overview - Drafting a Patent Application—The Drawings

The quality of a patent application can have a major effect on the value of any patent that issues from it. This article is the second installment in a multipart series that aims to help relative novice patent drafters quickly acquire the most important knowledge needed for drafting high-quality U.S. patent applications, particularly utility patent applications for technology-related inventions. The first installment covered the drafting of the claims.

This installment will cover the drawings, with an emphasis on software inventions - We do not address the preparation of drawings for design patent applications in this installment, since the considerations for preparing those are quite different from those for a utility patent application. Hence, this installment is limited to preparation of drawings for a US utility patent application. Future installments will cover drafting of the specification, including special considerations related to foreign filing (i.e., filing a patent application outside the United States).