What an IP strategy consultant does that your patent attorney does not, how engagements are priced, and the cases where you can skip one.
An IP strategy consultant works on the business half of a patent: deciding which inventions are worth protecting, documenting them, mapping what competitors own, and putting a value and a plan on what you hold. A strategist who is also an experienced inventor can help develop the inventions themselves. At ipCG, our disclosure work brings those business and invention perspectives together in a full technical specification for counsel. Your patent attorney drafts the claims, reviews and revises the application, and files it. If you already know what to file and why, a patent attorney or agent may be enough. If you need to decide what to protect or what to do with it, whether raising money, licensing, or building a product or business, that is the work we do, for one inventor or a whole R&D team.
The question we hear most at the start of an engagement is some version of “wait, you are not a lawyer?” No. Nobody at ipCG will file anything for you. Here is what we do instead, what it costs, and when the honest answer is that you can skip it.
Practice before the USPTO in patent matters is a defined thing. Under 37 CFR 11.5 it covers preparing or prosecuting an application, drafting the specification or claims, drafting replies to the examiner, and consulting with or giving advice to a client in contemplation of filing. For representation, applicants generally use registered patent attorneys or patent agents; the USPTO also allows individual applicants to act on their own behalf. Juristic entities must be represented by a patent practitioner. Agents can prosecute patent applications without holding a law license; broader legal advice, license agreements, and litigation generally need an attorney. The USPTO will not help you pick a practitioner (MPEP 401 says so), but it publishes the roster.
That definition is broad, and calling a document an invention disclosure does not by itself place the work outside patent practice. ipCG is a management consultancy, not a law firm. We develop the business context and technical disclosure in coordination with counsel; your registered practitioner takes responsibility for the application, drafts the claims, reviews and revises the specification, and files it under their own registration. Prior-art research gives counsel context; it is not a legal patentability opinion. We establish that division of responsibility early in the engagement. Confidentiality agreements protect confidential information, but they do not create attorney-client privilege. Ask counsel how to structure the engagement if privilege matters to you.
Technical insight, legal judgment, and business priorities all matter. Engineers understand how the technology works. Counsel evaluates patentability and the legal protection available. Someone also needs to answer what is worth protecting for the business. Attorneys may contribute to that strategy, and some firms have dedicated practices. The useful question is who is doing the work in your setup and whether the resulting portfolio serves your products and markets.
The business half is five kinds of work. The first is deciding what to protect and how: patent it, keep it as a trade secret, publish it defensively, or let it go, and in which countries. This is the expensive decision, and it is made before an attorney bills an hour.
The second is invention harvesting. Most invention capture fails at the documentation step, not the inventing step. In our sessions, a trained facilitator works four to eight engineers through the hard problems they solved, the workarounds nobody wrote up, and the design alternatives they rejected, while a scribe captures each one as problem, mechanism, novelty, and alternatives. Your attorney is welcome as an observer, and we keep counsel out of the facilitator’s chair on purpose: generating and evaluating are opposite modes, we watch engineers self-censor in front of the person who will judge patentability, and attorney-led brainstorming means paying legal rates for facilitation. A session produces the raw material. What we hand your attorney is the finished disclosure, written as the full specification with embodiments and alternatives, so their time goes to the claims and the legal review instead of to interviewing your engineers.
Third, the landscape: what competitors have filed, where it is crowded, where the open ground is. Counting patents is cheap; reading them is not, and the reading is what changes an R&D decision. Fourth, portfolio strategy: which filings cover which products, what to prune, the keep-or-drop call at each maintenance window, and a written strategy tied to business objectives. An IP strategy that is not written down is a set of habits. Fifth, valuation, monetization, and diligence prep, so an investor or acquirer can underwrite the portfolio instead of nodding at a patent pending slide.
A patent should not sit in isolation. Our approach is to tie each one to market, product, technology, and sales, and to be able to say that out loud to a board. We went through that exercise for a first patent on Invent Anything episode 71: So You Have Your First Patent! Part 2.
An IP strategist helps connect protection decisions to the business. Being an experienced inventor adds another skill: developing technical alternatives and recognizing inventions the team has not yet articulated. Those abilities do not automatically come with the strategist title. Ask who will do the work and what experience they bring on both sides.
The combination can change what you choose to file. Starting with one product feature, a strategist with invention experience can help explore improvements to the underlying technology, inventions on top of or around it, and opportunities elsewhere in the value chain. A component, manufacturing process, integration method, or service model may matter as much as the feature you first brought in. New business models can also suggest technical problems worth solving. Counsel then evaluates which resulting inventions warrant patent protection; an interesting business idea is not automatically a patentable invention.
The term varies widely across the industry. One team may mean a one- or two-page intake form with a basic description. Another may mean a detailed technical document approaching a thesis. A short intake form can start the conversation, but it is a different deliverable from a disclosure that explains how the invention works, its embodiments, and its alternatives. Compare the scope and substance before comparing prices.
Strong technical disclosure writing and IP strategy are different skills. An engineer or technical writer may explain an invention thoroughly without connecting it to a market or business objective. A strategist may understand the commercial opportunity without the invention experience needed to develop and describe the technical solution. The engagement needs the right combination.
At ipCG, an invention disclosure starts with understanding the business, market, product, and technology. We extract and develop the invention with the inventor, explain the potentially novel technical aspects, and put them in a business and invention context. The result is a substantive, patent-style technical specification with embodiments and alternatives for counsel to review and revise. It can resemble the technical body of a provisional or other patent application; it is not a filed application or a substitute for counsel’s work. The required depth depends on the invention, not a fixed page count.
The chart shows the current division of responsibility above the line and the additional support AI tools can provide below it. With an expert directing and checking the work, AI can help structure disclosures, compare embodiments, organize landscape research, and map portfolio coverage against products and business goals. For a strategist who is also an experienced inventor, it can support exploration of alternatives and opportunities across the value chain.
The expansion is in the scale and depth of the consultant’s work. AI does not supply missing invention experience or give a consultant authority to practice law. Inventors and technical experts verify the substance, strategists judge the business relevance, and counsel retains legal review, claims, filing, and prosecution. Tool output still needs checking against the original sources and the inventor’s actual contribution.
An attorney’s work begins after the most expensive decision has already been made. Drafting a U.S. utility application commonly runs $8,000 to $15,000 before government fees, and whether that money was well spent was settled when someone chose this invention over the other candidates. In our engagements, companies without the strategy layer rarely file too little. They file the wrong mix, and the product that pays the bills stays exposed while the portfolio grows.
The second place the money goes is interview time. Alexander Flake at Patentext put it well in June: the biggest waste in the patent process is paying a professional to extract information you could have written down in advance. We would go further. Most founders cannot write it down, because they have never seen a claim-oriented disclosure, and that is exactly what a harvesting session produces. Strong disclosures cut prosecution time by 30 to 40 percent in our experience, which is why consulting input usually reduces total legal spend rather than adding to it.
Your attorney protects the inventions you bring them. Strategy work is about improving what gets brought.
Gene Quinn made the wider point on IPWatchdog in August: the move worth making is from patent count to patent value, and not every improvement needs a patent. Agreed. One hedged number for scale: Ocean Tomo estimates intangible assets were about 92 percent of S&P 500 market value at the end of 2025, against 17 percent in 1975. It is a residual (market cap minus tangible assets), so read it as a direction, and the direction is that the business side of intangibles is most of the company.
If you cannot say which of your filings protects the product that pays the bills, that is the first thing to fix. Our services overview lays out the eight stages we work in, from a first business assessment through monetization, and the engagement cost page shows what each typically runs.
Attorneys mostly bill hourly, with experienced prosecution counsel commonly in the several-hundred-dollars-per-hour range; Patentext put practitioner rates at $300 to $800 an hour this year. Our engagements are fixed scope and fixed price, never hourly: a free discovery call, then a written proposal with scope, timeline, and budget. Retainers come later, usually after a first project.
The ranges, all from our published engagement cost page rather than a quote:
More inventors now use a language model to frame up an idea, and some ask one to write the whole provisional application. A few then come to us with a reasonable-sounding request: the draft is done, so reviewing it and cleaning it up before filing should be cheap.
It usually is not. An AI-generated disclosure hides most of the signal in the noise, and the closer we look, the harder it gets to separate what the inventor contributed from what the model filled in. In our experience it often costs more to edit an amateur’s AI draft into shape than to write a fresh disclosure from an interview with the inventor, so we prefer to write it ourselves, word for word, with our own tools and process. Generating the draft first and paying us to fix it later saves nothing. The AI route also carries its own risks, from inventorship to confidentiality to citations a model invents with a straight face; our post on whether AI can write your patent application covers them.
If you used AI to think through your invention, good. Send us the prompts, not the output. Treat us the way you treated the model: what you asked it and what you told it about the invention carry far more signal than the pages it wrote back.
A consultant is a paid engagement, and the need depends on what you are trying to accomplish. A focused filing or an early effort you can handle yourself may not call for one. Before deciding, separate the work of filing an invention from the work of choosing the right inventions and building a business around them.
One more, and it matters. Consulting is a fixed price for a defined deliverable with no promised outcome. The pattern the USPTO and the FTC warn about is different: a large upfront fee for a promise to market or license your invention. Under the American Inventors Protection Act a promoter has to disclose, before you sign, how many inventions it evaluated in the past five years, how many customers made a net profit, and how many got license agreements from its work. Ask for it. If the answer is a sales call, walk. (We get lumped in with these firms occasionally, which is why our answer to “can you file this for me” is always no: filing is your counsel’s job, and we work alongside them.)
Mark Anderson, an IP lawyer who writes as IP Draughts, argued in 2012 that “IP strategist” is a commercial badge or label with no qualifying exam behind it, and that plenty of patent attorneys already think about strategy. Still true fourteen years on. There is no license for this work, so judge a firm on deliverables, references, and who will actually do the work. IAM’s Strategy 300 for 2026, built from nearly 4,000 nominations, lists in-house IP heads, outside advisers, and academics side by side: IP strategy is a function, not a firm type.
Hayat Amin at Beyond Elevation frames the difference as tactician versus strategist. We think that undersells good attorneys; the real split is what each is licensed and paid to do. An attorney is paid to get a claim allowed and keep you out of trouble, an instinct that is right for an opinion and wrong for sizing a licensing market. His other claim, that a patent earning no revenue is really a liability, is too strong. Plenty of patents never earn a dollar directly and still do their job as a deterrent, a negotiating position, or the asset that survives diligence.
Ask your attorney one question: which of our filings covers the product that pays the bills, and what does the competitor two doors down own in the same space? If the answer comes back quickly and with specifics, your setup is working, and we will tell you the same thing on a discovery call. If it comes back as a list of application numbers, that is the gap.
A practical way to test the fit is a single fixed-scope project, a portfolio review or a landscape on one competitor, that produces something your counsel can act on. For an individual inventor, the equivalent is one disclosure and a plan for what the patent is for. Talk with our team and bring the portfolio list, or the invention you are trying to move forward.
That first project can also begin an ongoing relationship. ipCG works with clients over multiple years as their products, markets, and portfolios change. Familiarity with the invention and the business helps us revisit protection priorities and connect the work to fundraising, licensing, and commercialization decisions. The value is in continuity and informed decisions; an engagement does not guarantee funding, a license, or a commercial result.
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Written by
Seth Cronin