Patent Training for U.S. Army Engineers

I’d like to talk to you about army boot camp and how I came to train engineers and scientists in the army on what they need to know about patents. I’m Rich Beem. I’m a patent attorney in Chicago. One day I got a call from the person in charge of training in the U.S. Army on the east coast. It turns out that the army has 9,000 researchers, engineers, and scientists on the east coast alone who develop advance technologies. These are very smart people. Many of them are post-docs that have come out of the leading universities in the country. And, this training person saw that the engineers and scientists needed help in understanding when they had a patentable invention and what process they needed to go through. What kind of information they needed to put in their invention disclosures that would lead to the issuance of good patents. The army is nothing if they’re not about training and about metrics, and they use patents as a metric to measure the productivity of their inventors, their engineers, and their scientists. So, I have conducted at least 3 – maybe 4 – training courses for the engineers and the scientists of the army. These included people at the army research laboratory and at the Aberdeen proving ground, telling them about patents. And they came from all kinds of technologies. And as a result of that training they were able to – and they did – prepare and file more and better invention disclosures that led to better patents because they had a better understanding of the process. We have done the same things for companies. I have led training courses for Boeing. I’ve done training for Rolls Royce. I’ve done training for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. I love talking with engineers and managers, as well as lawyers and talking to them about the patent process. You must have questions about the patent process. You might want to have some training or at least to have some patent applications prepared and filed. You might have a patent litigation matter – that’s what I do. So, call me when you have a patent matter. I’m at 312-202-0011. Thank you!