Patent Clinic Selects 2011 Innovations

The Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) and the Patent Clinic wish to offer their congratulations to the companies that have been selected for participating in the 2011 Patent Clinic. This year, the  four law students enrolled in Professor Joe Barich’s Patent Prosecution Class in the College of Law at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign are authoring patent applications for four student innovators.

Founded in 2008, the Patent Clinic is a joint effort of the TEC and Joe Barich, an Adjunct Professor at the College of Law and a Shareholder at McAndrews, Held and Malloy of Chicago.  The Patent Clinic  allows law students the opportunity to draft patent applications for Illinois student inventors. The student inventors were selected from participants in the V. Dale Cozad New Venture Competition (CNVC), the Lemelson-MIT Illinois Student Prize and the Idea to Product Campus Competition, all of which are administered by the TEC.

“The inventiveness of the student innovators referred to us by the TEC is incredible!” said Professor Barich, “There were so many innovations that we would have enjoyed working with.  I regret that our Clinic enrollment only allows us to work with four.  However, I certainly join with the TEC in offering our best wishes for continued success in development of their inventions to all student inventors.” 

The Patent Clinic reviews the student innovations and, if an innovation is considered potentially patentable, drafts a patent application at no cost to the student. Consequently, the student innovators are provided with a service that would have cost them around $10,000 per patent application, were the patent applications drafted in a law firm.

Nick Lenzen of the Lenzen Intellectual Property Corporation in Chicago also supports the Patent Clinic. Mr. Lenzen volunteers his time to provide drafting services for the patent applications at no charge to the inventors or the University– a service that typically costs around $1,000 per application. This provides the inventors with the benefit of professional drawings to be included in their patent applications 

Innovations Selected for the Patent Clinic 
Colin Lake was selected for his product The Beacon. This is an affordable and portable fire safety device for the hearing impaired that plugs directly into a wall outlet and with a strobe light that is activated by the beeping frequency of a standard smoke detector. Working to draft his patent application is law student Kevin Yao.

Law student Siho Yoo is working with Integrated Sensor Systems, Inc (ISS) and its founders Blake Landry and James Palmer to draft a patent application for their sensor array which addresses environmental sensing applications. The team is moving aggressively forward, has obtained space in the Research Park, and is currently marketing their first sensor array.  The Patent Clinic is honored to be working with ISS again this year on a new model of sensor array.

WDOW, an online commerce website, founded by Ali Sakr and Julian Coltea is having a patent drafted by Jonathan Hughley of the Patent Clinic.  WDOW will help its users get the best deals out of their money, time and location.

Hunter McDaniel and Phill Heil are working on a simplified water meter that builds on their experiences from Electrical Engineers Without Borders. This is a cost effective device for people in developing counts which can help them distribute and manage their water supply more efficiently. Writing this patent application is law student Nicole Janovick.               

The law students will finalize the patent applications in late April, and turn them over to the inventors.  Once the inventors have received authorization from the Office of Technology Management (OTM), the inventors may proceed to file the patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 

This year marks the fourth year of the Patent Clinic’s operation. Over its history, around 25 patent applications have been drafted for student inventors. 

About the Patent Clinic

The Patent Clinic is a joint effort between the TEC and the University of Illinois College of Law (COL) in which selected participants from the Cozad New Venture Competition, the Lemelson-MIT Illinois Student Prize, and the Idea to Product entrants can have a patent application drafted for them at no cost, if their invention description includes a novel and potentially patentable device, system, or method. The value of this program is worth at least $10,000-$12,000 per patent application for each student/team. Innovators work with third-year law students to give them the information needed to author the applications, under the supervision of Professor Joe Barich.

Joe Barich is a shareholder at the law firm McAndrews, Held & Malloy Ltd. in Chicago and is also an Adjunct Professor in the College of Law where he has taught Patent Prosecution since the Spring semester of 2005. He partnered with TEC to launch the Patent Clinic during the spring of 2008; and this year accepted four student teams from more than twenty that applied. The collaboration and partnership is one that TEC continues to nurture and develop with each academic year. To date, over twenty patent applications have been drafted for our student innovators, which has provided over $200,000 in free patent work to them.  

About the Technology Entrepreneur Center 

The Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) is an interdisciplinary program in the College of Engineering engaging a vast pool of faculty, students, and alumni to provide the education, experiences, and resources that students need to become innovative leaders and empower them to change the world around them. Created in 2000 to highlight the University’s rich history and culture of innovation, the TEC continues to inspire its engineering students to become the next generation of world-changing visionaries, leaders and entrepreneurs.  This is accomplished through its courses, venture and product competitions, workshops, and other curricular and extra-curricular events that expose students to the complex concepts inherent in the simultaneous processes of technology innovation and market adoption. The Center offers on-site and online certificate programs for education and professional development and hosts outreach activities for students and alumni. The TEC also administers the annual V. Dale Cozad New Venture Competition and the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Illinois Student Prize for innovation, among several other programs.