I’ve never been much for blogging. Patents are great and I love my job, but I’m generally not a piecemeal communicator when it comes to the law.

I’ve written a few articles, and I post a lot of things on my own personal Facebook (not viewable to the public, obviously), However, offering quips about the law, especially in light of the risk of making a comment that could be mistaken for legal advice, never seemed very inviting to me.

I am urged by many legal organizations and other patent professionals to attempt to be as warm and forthcoming on my blog about my job as I can manage in person, albeit with a bit of an arms’- length insulation, and always, always, remind the viewer that my comment does not constitute legal advice. So, I will attempt to finally get around to posting a bunch of content.

I’m told that I need to anticipate two types of potential visitors to the site sophisticated clients, having an existing patent portfolio, who are seeking alternate representation, and novice or pro se applicants for patent, who are attempting to educate themselves, and / or investigating hiring a patent attorney.

For sophisticated clients, I’m supposed to post formal content that is unlikely to be read, but which indicates that I am more than confident in topics which they can’t be bothered to process, but which indicate sufficient competency to warrant further communication. For novice clients, I should post casual – language explanation of basic to provide some sort of small guidance through an obtuse concept, and further entice communication in person. Plainly, those are at odds with one another, and in fact, posting for one, might discourage the other. For a variety of reasons, I field more questions from novice applicants, so I’ll start with a post for those folks.

Right now, I’m about to go to the annual winter WCBA (Wake County Bar Association) lunch at the WCBA annual winter lunch, and thereafter a free CLE. However, after that, I’ll be writing some claims for a coming application. So, this next note will be confined to discussing perspective in selecting claim language.

As a last introductory note, I’m also advised that a law website should be about the law, and perhaps those seeking to learn about the law, and not about me, the patent professional. That makes sense, insofar as both types of likely visitors are interested in seeing content (whether or not they plan to read it). So, why has this blogpost been about me and a plan to keep an eye toward a regular series of blog posts? Well, you’ve gotta start somewhere, right? Also, I’m taking a page from comedy writers who say that you’ve got to start with notes about yourself, in order to maintain a persona to guide and encourage short term bursts of inspiration. Being too broadminded can stagnate content.

With that, here we go,
Here’s some substance: claim language as ugly poetry: [moved to its own post]…