The professional staff at Kligler & Associates came to the firm from a wide range of backgrounds. For many of us, patent practice is a second career, after having first worked in high-tech industry. In this article, patent attorney Nadav Wertsman, shares experience from his personal journey, and discusses what makes his work special.
Nadav, an engineer by training, worked in high-tech industry for more than twenty years, spanning technological, marketing, and management positions, with more than a dozen patents in his name. In 2014, however, Nadav decided that he was ready for a new challenge. He joined Kligler in 2014, to become a patent attorney, leaving his successful business career behind.
When asked about the shift in his career, Nadav explained that in the course of his work in high tech, he came to understand the tremendous strategic importance of good IP protection. He realized how valuable a patent can be for – among other things – differentiating one product from another, but also that there is often a huge gap between companies’ needs for patent protection and counseling and the service they actually get from their patent attorneys.
“During the process of winning over a strategic client, just before the closing of a huge international transaction, I realized that its approval was being delayed due to an alleged patent infringement. It took us six months to overcome the obstacle. It was then that I realized the power of a protected patent. The deeper I studied the field, the more I realized the importance of patent protection. Companies work hard on developing new products, invest money in analyzing strategic moves, and design business development processes. Many of them fail to take full advantage of patents as a value-for-money tool for securing their business interests and the impact of a having protected patent.”
Nonetheless, Nadav admits that the process of obtaining patents can be exhausting. Recalling his experience at on client side, Nadav explains that clients are always rushing between projects and deadlines. They need a patent attorney with the necessary background to understand them precisely and quickly. “Having a good background, on both the technological and business sides, is critical in saving time for the inventor. Many of us at Kligler have experience in the marketplace and hold advanced degrees in science and engineering. We understand the technical problems and the deep-tech solutions to these problems, and we are able to convert our clients’ ideas into strong patent applications, without too much burden to the inventors.”
“The second advantage is – because most of us have many years of experience in this field and understand the importance of a patent as a business tool, we encourage inventors to expand their scope of IP protection. After I have spoken the inventor and feel that I understand the invention, I try to dig deeper and ask the inventor about ways to improve the invention or apply it in other products. We often receive raw ideas from engineers, sometimes buried in masses of technical information, from which we need to distill out the inventive essence. We encourage the inventor to fill in missing details and think of all the possible variations on the solution, but without crossing the line and inventing for our client – though it is often tempting to do so. We walk a narrow line with the engineers, to help them transform ideas into patents. As opposed to my first career, one of the benefits in this second one is that I get into the fascinating depths of things.”
