
Ask HN: Reward for Patents After Leaving the Company? - wsr
Hi HN -<p>I have a patent&#x2F;employment related question that I&#x27;d love to get some advice on.<p>I worked for a well-known tech company. During my tenure, I filed for many patents on the company&#x27;s behalf. IIRC, the company gives you ~$1k for filing a patent, and additional ~$10k once the patent is approved. I unfortunately no longer have access to the official patent policy.<p>I received the initial reward of $1k for each of my patent filings. However, I left before the patent was granted. I only realized today that these patents have all been approved by USPTO as of earlier this year.<p>My questions are:<p>1. Should I still be entitled for the final reward from the company?<p>2. If so, I&#x27;d love to hear HN community&#x27;s advice on how I should approach the company to seek the reward.<p>I feel like I am not alone in this because patents takes a long time to approve and people move around in our industry. So I hope the answers to these questions can help others too.<p>Many thanks in advance!
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patio11
Entitled is a funny word with two senses here. One is "Do I have a claim for
compensation which the legal system will back?" and another is "Do I deserve
do get paid this money?"

Legal questions are often best answered by a lawyer. The lawyer is going to
ask to see the contract you have with your employer about this compensation. I
do not have access to this contract, but I have a probabalistic guess for you
based on standard practices in the tech industry: you do not, in fact, have a
contractual right to payment for the company's patents. They're the company's
patents, not your patents -- you signed an IP assignment agreement which made
this absolutely, unambiguously clear roughly contemporaneously with starting
your job. Your sole guaranteed compensation for any work was your salary. Your
company owes you zero dollars and zero cents of remaining salary; they mathed
the heck out of that when you stopped working for them and, after that check
was cut, you were even. Your company has discretion in awarding your bonuses
when you worked there; they're going to exercise their discretion in not
awarding you bonuses since you do not work there.

Do you deserve to get paid the money? That's a rather different kettle of
fish. To the extent that you're well-educated adult who can understand
contracts presented to you in English, none of the above should come as a
surprise. To the extent that one thinks that the purpose of the bonus is not
incenting future behavior but rather rewarding past behavior, a reasonable
argument could be made that since you put in the work you should receive the
fruits of it.

~~~
wsr
Thanks for the long reply patio11.

I can see where you are coming from, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same
argument is used by the company. If that is the case. O well, I wish them well
but I would never be this naive again.

There is just one point that you might have missed.

The patent work doesn't stop the moment you finish filing. In fact, almost all
valuable patents will be challenged in court, which can cost a LOT of money.
In those cases, the company would have to hire back the original inventors to
defend them in court, for which the original inventors can charge almost an
arbitrary amount of money for.

In my personal opinion, it would not be wise for the company to argue over
pocket change amount of money if it risks destroying the relationship between
the company and the inventor. If that is really the case, when the day comes
that the company needs help, the inventor would not hesitate to charge
exorbitant fee just to spite the company. I honestly believe this is why
@smoyer in the other comment is still getting paid by his company even though
he is no longer employed.

Last but not least, on a human level, I feel it is a bit unfair given how much
extra I worked for these patents, above and beyond my call of duty. I'm not
going to cry over it but it will leave me in a pretty bad mood. If I end up
getting screwed over, well... let my experience serve as a lesson for rest of
the aspiring inventors in similar situation in the future.

~~~
lucozade
> the company would have to hire back the original inventors to defend them in
> court

What makes you say that? I'm genuinely curious. I'm the named inventor on a
few of patents for a previous employer that were all granted after I left. It
never occurred to me that they would continue to need my services (nor have
they).

BTW have you asked your previous employer about the situation? My guess is
that @smoyer's situation is fairly rare and the company will likely consider
it a perk rather than an entitlement. It's not clear there would be any harm
in asking though.

~~~
wsr
I have friends who have gone through this experience. I was pretty surprised
too that the company was willing to pay so much to defend their patents.
Granted... my friend's rate was fairly reasonable... I think between
$500-$1000/hour in probably the early 2000s.

It really depends on the patent in the end of the day. If a company can
potentially lose tens or hundreds of millions over a lost lawsuit, spending a
million on legal defense would be very reasonable.

I have not talked to my employer about this. I wanted to get some collective
wisdom from the HN community before approaching them. But yeah, I'll
definitely give it a shot. It doesn't hurt to ask.

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madcaptenor
That's up to your company's policy. My company has a similar policy with a
two-stage award, and you're not entitled to the award for approval if it's
approved after you leave.

Do you have any former colleagues/friends at the company who could get you a
copy of the policy?

~~~
wsr
Good point! I'll check to see if any of my friends can get me a copy of the
patent policy.

I wonder how legal it is in the state of California to bar the people from
getting their reward simply because they are no longer with the company.
Patent approval has nothing to do with the employment status. This seems a bit
unfair to be honest.

Further, they specifically asked me for help AFTER I left the company. I
agreed to help as a good-will gesture. I wish I could've clarified the reward
policy back then.

~~~
madcaptenor
Out of curiosity, I checked our policy. The people who can get monetary awards
at my company are:

\- active employees, and

\- retired employees who retire with eligibility for retiree health benefits
(my understanding is that this is, approximately, people who worked for the
company for 20 years or more), if they provide requested assistance to the
company to get the patent issued after their retirement.

So at my company, if you just _left_ without having been here for a long time,
they wouldn't give you the money after you left. (This is what I thought, and
good to know in my case since I have a few patents in the pipeline myself...)

Furthermore, there is no mention that "this is different in California". We
employ people all over the country including in California, and a lot of our
policies do call out California specifically because it does have different
laws, so I suspect there's nothing special about California here. (I am not a
lawyer.)

~~~
wsr
Thanks for sharing madcaptenor! Very interesting to know this!

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smoyer
I also wrote a lot of abstracts for a large cable television equipment
manufacturer. In some cases, Ididn't even write the application but they've
continued to pay me both the filing award and patent award fees. I haven't
worked there since 2010 but they're still paying me as an employee.

~~~
wsr
Interesting! At least there is one case that the company is doing the right
thing. Thanks for sharing smoyer!

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nickm12
1\. No, you are not entitled to the final reward (almost certainly).

Maybe your employment contract is different than other companies I have heard
of, but this ought to be just like any other bonus (referral bonus, holiday
bonus, etc.). When you terminate your employment, you are no longer eligible
for employee bonuses.

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chrisbennet
The company most likely was banking on most employees never collecting the
patent granting "reward". Like equity, it's a carrot to motivate/manipulate
you, not a sincere "thank you".

