The Center is the culmination of Professor Provorny’s pioneering methods that provide world-class experiential education to students, together with timely, sophisticated, world-class yet affordable legal and other services to research organizations, entrepreneurs, early stage companies and nonprofits. The Center’s program builds on the successes of the programs that preceded it. The following examples illustrate the kinds of work our students have accomplished. Members of our team or our extensive network of professional service providers and advisors supervise and mentor our students.
Our exacting client, student and mentor selection processes are designed so that the most talented, insightful and motivated people available anywhere work intimately with institutions, emerging companies and entrepreneurs who create products and services that can transform our personal and business lives, serve pressing social and business needs, and are excellent candidates for funding regardless of how bad economic conditions may be.
We have drafted dozens of provisional, actual and PCT [Patent Cooperation Treaty] utility patent applications for institutional and entrepreneurial clients covering a wide variety of technologies. We have also developed techniques to draft complex applications under severe time constraints, including two actual applications for a client in less than two weeks from acceptance of the engagement to the filing deadline. Enlisting the assistance of the Center’s students and experienced professional mentors can save a client at least 50% in patent procurement costs.
We go “by the book” in filing provisional applications, comply strictly with all statutory requirements, thereby making it easier to draft the actual application and maximizing the chances that clients will preserve their priority date when they file their actual application and their patent rights when they file outside th4e United States.
Not only does each of our students, regardless of background or discipline, learn to draft patent applications, but we have trained our entrepreneurial clients who seek patent assistance how to conduct patent searches and draft applications. The end result is a better application in which the inventor has had primary input and even steeper reductions in patent procurement costs.
We have helped numerous foreign clients to establish a presence in the United States. The Center has extensive experience in setting up domestic subsidiaries, including preparation of bylaws, assisting clients in obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals to do business, and providing marketing, technical, legal and other assistance as well as introductions to potential sources of funding.
We provide advice and guidance to clients seeking approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) for products FDA regulates. We do the same for “green” or “clean” technologies and products, and alternative energy sources, which require interaction with or the approval of Federal agencies.
Our students have drafted an extensive array of domestic and international agreements for our clients. Examples include licenses of software, patents, trademarks and other intellectual property; assignments and security agreements; material transfer agreements and clinical trial agreements; employment, employee, independent contractor, consulting, sales, purchase, distribution, joint venture and other collaboration, manufacturing and outsourcing agreements, operating agreements for limited liability companies and shareholder agreements for corporations.
We maintain intellectual property databases and perform other intellectual property portfolio management services for clients.
We offer a full array of non-patent intellectual property services, including, but not limited to, trade secrets protection, copyright registration, trademark procurement, and licensing. We handle appeals of finale rejections of trademark applications to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. We train our entrepreneur clients who seek copyright and trademark assistance to perform searches of the requisite databases.
We have assisted a client with a particularly complicated portfolio of in-house and licensed patents and applications to understand where there were gaps, where there is overlap or duplication, and which patents and applications are necessary to achieve their long-term business strategy. We also manage and update the database that our students created as part of this project These services have resulted not only in the client’s making better decisions about use of its intellectual property assets but also in saving the client hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to outside law firms.
We do the legal work, including patent applications, for a company that has developed innovative technologies to allow employers systematically to select health insurance plans for their employees that provides optimal coverage considering the employer’s individual circumstances and health care budget. These products will thus reduce confusion and guesswork by employers making choices about health care coverage for their employees.
We do the legal work, including patent applications and other intellectual property, for a company that has developed proprietary products and methods that can alter industrial and other processes to use biological materials that not only add value to the customer but also make such processes environmentally compatible and sustainable, provide additional sources of high quality nutrition to a rapidly growing population, and transform the future of struggling rural communities.
We prepared and helped implement a records management and retention policy and schedule for a client, as well as a business and operational continuity plan for the client in the event of natural or man-made disasters.
We have prepared HR [Human Resources] policies, procedures, and manuals for clients, as well as forms implementing them and documenting compliance.
For a client wishing to develop and market a new medical device, we have provided guidance and advice on a complex intellectual property environment, as well as the most expeditious ways to obtain approval by FDA. In addition, we have provided technical guidance on development of the product, analysis of potentially competing products and market entrants, and a study to determine other possible applications for the product
We are providing engineering and other technical assistance to a client who wishes to develop a new type of athletic equipment.
We have evaluated inventions by faculty and staff of the college of science of a large public university for commercial potential and, with the active encouragement of the dean and the university’s technology transfer office, have provided guidance and assistance to the inventors with respect to commercialization.
We provided assistance to a coalition of nonprofit organizations that wanted to pool their efforts to provide child welfare services to overcome difficult copyright issues and created a collaboration agreement and other mechanisms that have made seamless cooperation among the organizations a reality.
We assist arts organizations to make optimal use of their intellectual property (primarily copyrights but occasionally patents and trademarks) and advise them on operational and governance matters.
We provide due diligence to angel investor groups and venture capital forms; in turn, we have an extensive worldwide network of potential funding sources to whom we can introduce clients.
We have the capability to assist companies and research organizations to reconfigure the intellectual property portfolios to generate more revenue or to make them more attractive candidates for licensing or acquisition.