Mechanical & Materials

Mechanical claims are where design-arounds are easiest — and hardest to stop.

A mechanical claim that recites one embodiment protects one product. Building a family that actually covers the design space takes an engineer who can see the alternatives before a competitor does.

Published patents in this area: 2,602
Professionals: 21

We prosecute and litigate across machine design and mechanisms, manufacturing processes and machine tools, automotive structures and chassis, vehicle braking systems, fluid and thermal systems, consumer products, and structural and materials engineering. Robotics, industrial automation and autonomous driving are handled in their own areas.

This is a long-standing technical tradition of the firm and a substantial share of the published patent listings — imaging and printing apparatus, industrial machinery, and the mechanical systems inside products whose value proposition is electronic.

Covering the design space, not the drawing

Mechanical inventions are the easiest to design around, because the alternatives are visible to any competent engineer looking at the patent. A claim reciting the embodiment in the drawings protects that drawing.

The work is enumerating the alternatives before filing — the other ways to achieve the same kinematic relationship, the other materials, the other places to put the joint — and claiming the relationship they share. That is an engineering exercise, and it happens before any legal drafting begins.

Mechanical systems inside electronic products

Much of this practice is mechanical work inside products whose value proposition is electronic: thermal paths and enclosures, actuators and haptics, precision assemblies, and the manufacturing tolerances that make them producible. These inventions are frequently under-captured because the engineering organization does not think of them as innovations.

They are also frequently the limitation a competitor cannot design around, because the electronics can be reimplemented and the physics cannot.