You may wonder whether you can save money by writing and filing your own patent application. Maybe you could write your own application and simply have a patent attorney review it before filing. It certainly sounds like a reasonable plan. But in my experience, few clients are equipped to write their own applications.
A patent application is a highly structured document, the drafting of which is not intuitive for most people without experience writing patents. It is very difficult for an inexperienced patent author to capture the appropriate scope of protection in a self-authored patent application. Further, in my experience, it often takes more work to edit and revise an inventor’s version of an application than it is to write it myself from a thorough invention disclosure.
I understand your concerns and I appreciate your desire to do as much as you can yourself. In order to keep your costs low and still get the high quality patent you want, you can help me by preparing a complete and clear invention disclosure, including drawings, and providing an insightful description of the differences between your invention and the known prior art. Having this information in the invention disclosure will help me better evaluate the invention, reduce the time I need to prepare the application and enable me to provide you lower cost patent services.