Welcome to Patent Tech Tips, a new blog about using technology to make life easier for the patent practitioner and associated support staff. In addition, ethical and legal concerns surrounding such technology use will also be discussed.

With so many patent-related blogs in the blogsphere, you may be wondering why there is a need for yet another blog that busy practitioners don’t have the hours in a day to read. The reason is simple: most blogs geared for patent practitioners do not focus heavily on the technology needed in their day-to-day job and the legal and ethical concerns of that technology. The blogs that come to mind that devote any significant percentage of posts to technology are the Invent Blog and Erik J. Heels’ blog, but that still leaves a large number of topics unexplored.

Thus, this blog was born. Similar postings will not generally be repeated. It would be redundant and who can compete with reference postings such as the Guide to Downloading Patent Copies? Certainly, not me.

Instead, you will hopefully find original and useful posts with the occasional associated download.

Furthermore, this blog is not meant to be a one way street. Please leave comments and otherwise collaborate for the benefit of the profession. Often, for legal, ethical, or personal privacy reasons, I cannot just give you the exact configuration/setting file I actually use. Thus, I need your assistance in creating a plain vanilla one that works for most situations — then, you can download and customize it for your personal circumstances. For example, in upcoming posts, I will discuss the exclude dictionary feature of Microsoft Office. While I will create a small exclude dictionary for download, I will need your feedback on what additional terms should be added. I will then add those terms to the blog-created exclude dictionary.

Finally, while most practitioners use Microsoft Office and other proprietary software, open-source applications will also be discussed when appropriate.

I look forward to your comments and collaboration in the future. Once again, welcome to Patent Tech Tips and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed!