IP Intelligence
Inventor's Red Flag Checklists
Short, honest checklists to run before you disclose, file, respond, license or launch.
Showing 20 of 20.
Before you disclose your invention
India has no general grace period. Anything already available to the public before your priority date can be prior art against your own application - including thing…
Before you file
Filing is cheap to do and expensive to do badly. These are the things that cannot be fixed afterwards.
The week after you file
Filing starts several clocks at once and nothing will remind you about any of them.
Before responding to an examination report
Everything you say in a reply is public and permanent. The two ways to lose value here are missing the date and conceding more than you needed to.
Before launching a product
Your own patent tells you what others may not do. It never tells you what you may do. This checklist is about the second question.
Before filing outside India
The twelve-month priority window is effectively immovable, and section 39 catches Indian residents in a way most people never hear about.
After grant: the things that quietly kill patents
Very few Indian patents are lost to competitors. They are lost to handovers, stale addresses and obligations nobody owns.
Before a funding round or an acquisition
IP diligence rarely finds bad patents. It finds missing paperwork - and that is what delays closings and re-prices rounds.
Before licensing a patent
Most licence disputes are not about the rate. They are about who may do what, where, and what happens when something changes.
Before you enforce a patent
The first letter is the most important document in a patent dispute, and it is usually written by whoever is free that week.
Before you publish or submit a paper
For researchers, the order of publishing and filing is worth more than almost any other decision. In India, publishing first usually destroys novelty in your own wor…
Before you brief a patent drafter
A specification can only contain what the drafter was told. These are the things drafters most often are not told, and most often need.
Before a hearing with the Controller
A hearing is the last chance to change the outcome before a decision is written. The Controller has already read the file.
Before signing a research collaboration
Collaboration agreements decide ownership, publication and control years before anyone knows what will be invented.
Before choosing secrecy over a patent
Both choices are legitimate. The decision turns on one question that is easy to answer honestly and easy to avoid.
Before you abandon or stop renewing
Pruning is healthy. Abandoning by accident is not, and the two look identical in a spreadsheet.
Before a trade show or demo day
Events are where the most expensive disclosure mistakes happen, because everything about them is designed to make you show more.
If you receive an infringement notice
A notice is an assertion, not a finding. What you do in the first two weeks shapes everything after.
Before you choose a patent agent or attorney
Drafting quality is invisible at the time and decisive later. These questions surface the difference.
Before buying or selling patents
A patent transaction is a title transaction. Most of the risk is in paperwork rather than in technology.
Keep going.
Every explanation here links to the ones next to it. Follow the thread rather than the menu.
Educational guidance, not legal advice. This material is published by Ragulika IP for general education and information. It is not legal advice, it does not create a professional-client relationship, and it is not a substitute for advice on your own facts. Patentability, infringement, prosecution strategy and every other IP outcome turn on the specific facts and on the law and Patent Office practice as they stand at the time you act. Please take professional advice before making a decision, and read the underlying provision or judgment before relying on any point stated here.