This is a question that most new inventors ask themselves, often after first receiving a quotation from a patent attorney to do it for them! The simple answer to the question is “yes”. You can file a UK patent yourself. There is no legal prohibition on you representing yourself before the UKIPO (the UK Intellectual Property Office) – just like there’s no prohibition on you doing the conveyancing for your own house, or representing yourself in a court of law.

In fact, the UKIPO’s corporate strategy includes a remit to extend the benefits of IP protection to more inventors to benefit society as a whole. Accordingly, the UKIPO does do its best to help the private inventor; for example they’ll write particularly detailed letters to explain the patent process.

Whether it’s a good idea to try to do this is another matter altogether. It will take a lot of time, but if you’ve got the time and the skill to write a detailed technical description of your invention that may not be a problem. More fundamentally, if you’re thinking of writing your own patent, ask yourself the question: “will I be able to get the best possible patent for my invention?” if I do it myself. In some circumstances you might be able to do so – but consider these problems:

It’s the normally the job of the patent examiner working at UKIPO or any of the other IP offices around the world to seek to limit the extent of the claims made by an inventor. They want to limit the scope of the patent for a number of reasons, one of which is so that you don’t get more credit than you’re due. Patent attorneys spend a lot of time negotiating with patent examiners to get them to accept a patent that provides fair protection for the inventor, and not just the extent that the examiner feels most comfortable with.

If your invention is an absolutely new invention in a new area of development, and it’s clear that no one has done anything like it ever before, then gaining a patent may be relatively straightforward. Most inventions, however, are developments of existing items, and here the prior art can be confusing. This is where you may need an experienced patent attorney to be able to establish a definition of what constitutes the new invention in the first place.

If you have invented something that you know is a real improvement on what has gone before, whether it’s an enhancement or in a new field, you have a chance to exploit the invention. That, after all, is why you want a patent in the first place – to license the invention to a manufacturer in return for a royalty, perhaps. You may even want to raise funds to manufacture it yourself. You have to ask yourself whether an investor wouldn’t be much more encouraged to see a professionally-drafted patent, or whether a manufacturer might not see a way to make something similar to, but not an infringement of, a patent that you have done yourself and become a potential competitor rather than a supplier.

So, yes, you can draft your own patent, and you will find information on this site that will give you some insights into how to do it better. If you’re confident that you can produce multiple inventions, then you would certainly get a great education by going through the process yourself. If you just want to say that you’ve patented something, but don’t expect it’ll make any money, then why not – sometimes this is called a vanity patent. But if this is you first great invention, and you think it’s got commercial potential, if you don’t invest in intellectual property rights you risk losing some or all of the value you have created.