Patent filing coordination for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

All US patent matters for foreign-domiciled applicants run through a USPTO-registered practitioner (rule effective July 2026); CapEasy organises the disclosure file, art references and deadlines behind them.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for patent filing coordination — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Patent filing coordination sits inside trademarks & ip, alongside Trademark search & registration, Trademark office action response, Trademark renewal (§8 & §9). Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

No. Since July 20, 2026, every foreign-domiciled applicant must be represented by a USPTO-registered patent practitioner — a patent attorney or agent who has passed the separate USPTO patent bar exam. We organize the disclosure, prior art, and deadlines; the registered practitioner drafts the claims, files, and prosecutes.

A provisional is a detailed written disclosure that locks in a priority filing date without formal claims and is never examined on its own — it simply buys twelve months. A nonprovisional has formal claims, drawings, and a specification, and it's the one an examiner actually reviews. Most applications file a provisional first to secure the date cheaply, then convert to nonprovisional within the twelve-month window.

The provisional simply lapses, and the priority date is gone — there is no grace period and no way to revive it. If the invention is later refiled, it gets a new, later priority date, which matters if anyone else has filed on something similar in the meantime. We calendar this deadline the day the provisional is filed for exactly this reason.

Track One Prioritized Examination is a real, purchasable expedite — $4,515 large entity / $1,806 small entity / $903 micro entity as of June 1, 2026 — that targets a first Office Action in about two to three months and final disposition in roughly a year, versus a standard queue that commonly runs well over a year to the first Office Action alone. It only applies at or after nonprovisional filing, not on a provisional. Whether it's worth the fee depends on how much the timeline matters to your business; we'll flag the tradeoff at intake so the practitioner can size the request against your actual filing.

We run the invention-disclosure interview, organize the prior art you already know about, track every deadline from the provisional's twelve-month window through post-grant maintenance fees, and assemble the file — drawings, background, description — into the shape the registered practitioner needs to draft claims and file in Patent Center without starting from a blank page.

Since January 17, 2024, USPTO applies a format surcharge to nonprovisional utility filings whose specification, claims, and abstract aren't submitted in DOCX through Patent Center — a PDF filing is still accepted but costs more for the same result. We prepare the disclosure content in a DOCX-ready structure from the start so the practitioner's filing avoids the surcharge.

Twenty years from the earliest nonprovisional filing date, but only if maintenance fees are paid at the 3.5-, 7.5-, and 11.5-year marks after grant. Missing one of those can let the patent lapse before the twenty years are up. We calendar all three dates once a patent issues.

Most nonprovisional applications receive at least one Office Action citing prior art or other grounds for rejection — it's a normal part of prosecution, not necessarily a dead end. We organize the cited references and rejection grounds into the file so the registered practitioner's response time goes into strategy — amending claims, arguing over the art, or filing a Request for Continued Examination — rather than reconstructing the record.

Either path is legitimate. A provisional is cheaper upfront and buys time to test the invention's viability before committing to full claims and drawings, but it adds a step and a deadline. Filing straight to nonprovisional skips that, at higher upfront cost and drafting effort. We flag the tradeoff explicitly at intake based on your timeline and budget so the practitioner drafts around a decision you've actually made.

It applies to both — the foreign-domiciled practitioner requirement covers all US patent matters, design and utility alike. Design patent coordination is handled as its own service since the process and drawings requirements differ from a utility filing; this leaf covers utility patents specifically.

A description of the invention in your own words is the starting point — how it works, what problem it solves, and any variations you're aware of — plus anything you already know about similar existing products or patents. We turn that into the structured disclosure file the practitioner drafts from; nothing about the invention needs to be pre-formatted before you talk to us.