Bay Area IP Group, llc Opiniões 58

Resposta da Bay Area IP Group, llc

4/12/2017

Response from Abby (POC Paralegal): We strive to make every client happy; however, you defiantly ordered the $249 packaged research/opinion/consult service with 50% reduced $3500 flat-fee Utility offer for micro-entities, which, by your own admission to me, you did not qualify for b/c you said that you could not afford it. Hence, you acted in bad faith, against our clear instruction not to order it, and you further did not follow our automated instruction (and common sense) to confirm we even got your disclosure submission and/or if work was docketed. Everything you complain about here stems from this, your original wrong doing. Without giving us chance at all, you called us in a yelling tirade, demanding superiors, and same day posted your Yelp flame, even lying at one point that we were “TOTALLY A SCAM”, trying to force us to render service you wrongfully ordered and did not even confirm email received. This extremely aggressive, confrontational approach you have is contemptible behavior that no patent firm, including ours, should have to tolerate, especially when you engaged us in bad-faith as you did. It is such ‘bad apples’ that have forced most reputable patent firms to avoid dealing with individuals, and give individual inventors a bad reputation in the legal community.

The $249/$3500 offer webpage you ordered the search/opinion first step on specifically says:
“Get a Full Patent Search included with the below $3500 flat-Fee Patent Application Offer. Pay only $250* now- balance becomes credited later. However, No-obligation. ”
See where it says ‘with’ in “Search included with the below $3500 flat-Fee Patent Application Offer” that is what I told you and you knowingly ignored to take advantage of us trying to help good-faith individual inventors to afford doing a full search/opinion/consult before making the big decision to do a Utility patent application. Bad apples like you can mess it up for all the others.

To be very clear: No one should order our $249 Utility package offer search unless they can afford the Utility patent package and intend to promptly file it upon favorable results, even if not with us. That is how package special offers work.

We checked your Yelp profile and apparently you are a very opinionated Yelper with a history of reactively giving companies wrongful 1-star reviews, apparently as a means to attack; for example, you posted this about a Mexican restaurant that you simply could not afford:
“I try not to write negative reviews, but I can't help it. This place is awful. The main terrible thing is the prices. … There's so much great Mexican food in SF. Don't bother with this place unless you are on an expense account.”

So, you said they had good food and service; however, just because the prices were higher than you could afford you chose to use Yelp as an attack weapon against them with a 1-star. We find this pattern is a gross misrepresentation of that establishment’s product/service and is accordingly an abuse of Yelp. Based solely on this history, we find your 1-star ratings have scant credibility and disserves the Trustpilot and Yelp community, and Yelp policy should ban such abusive ratings, instead of encouraging it.

To correct your intentionally false accounts, here is instead what actually occurred:
1. You order a $249 package offer search in defiance of me telling you that you do not qualify and may not order it, and submitted your material on 10/24.
2. You got no confirmation from us that we received your email. For all you know it could have been blocked as SPAM and never actually received and processed.
3. You did not check if we got and were working on it until 6 days later on 10/30.
4. Unfortunately, our paralegal who processes submissions had a family emergency (her husband suffered a debilitating stroke) and only worked partial hours that week where, unknown to the rest of us, she did not docket some searches submitted in that time. We only learned of that issue when you much later emailed us on 10/30. Despite the fact our server sent you an auto reply instructing you to call us if you do not get an official confirm of work within 2 days, which YOU failed to do. Obviously, emails are not 100% reliable, and often get blocked by SPAM filters; so, it is only common sense that if you never get a confirmation that your email was received, and it was put in queue for work, that you should promptly call in to verify and status. As such, it is not true that we “Missed all the deadlines” as you claim. You missed the 2 day ‘deadline’ to check if we even got your email submission and that the work was docketed properly. However, even knowing all of this, you still never updated your flame Yelp post to reflect our unfortunate personnel problem circumstance, which is further evidence you are a bad-faith person just abusing Trustpilot and Yelp as your weapon.
5. When you called on 10/30 asking where is your search report you began screaming at Mai that we were late and not meeting our guarantee and demanding to talk to a supervisor. None was available at the time and you were acting very angry and would not let her get off the phone to answer another call coming in, so she just had to switch to the other line, and you were gone by the time she returned to your line.
6. On the same day, 10/30, and even before you alerted us to it not being docketed for work you post a 1-star flame Yelp post, not even giving us any chance/time to rectify our oversight you post multiple bad faith attacks, and then defamed us with the outright lie “DO NOT TRUST THESE SCAMMERS.”, fully knowing about our personnel issues that week and that we were putting it in queue for work right after your call. This is very bad form on your part. You did not give us the benefit of any doubt, and instead preemptively went on the full attack/defamation mode. That sort of confrontational, verbally abusive behavior does not deserve any compassion. If anything it is very provocative. Moreover, no-one should expect that we ought to concede to your demand to let you (yell at) our “more seniors” like you did to our paralegal about completely circumstantial things that were absolutely minor, and you actually had no rights to in any case given you defiantly ordered a package search service that I told you that did not qualify for.
7. We delivered our search report 6 days afterwards.
8. You were apparently pleased with the quality of our search results as you had no complaints and demanded our patentability legal opinion.
9. We refused to render further service to you because of our discovery that you ordered the package search in bad faith, behaved reprehensibly to us on the phone, and I told you that until you remove your outright lie “DO NOT TRUST THESE SCAMMERS” we refuse any further work, and will seek alternative remedies against you if you did not comply.
10. You admitted that your Yelp posted outright lied about us being scammers, and you promptly removed that from your post, but instead carefully reworded it to avoid being sued for lying by saying “I felt like…I was being scammed, … seemed like it could be a SCAM the whole time. Most of time, thought I was about to be ripped off…. SCAM ALERT!”, and even to this day, knowing we rendered competent and valuable research/ legal opinion services in good faith, you still refuse to edit those “SCAM” related things out of your Yelp flame post, which further reveals that your main, if not only, goal is vindictive retribution because we would not concede to your unreasonable and unfair demands.

You originally called in asking about the $249 search/opinion offer, and I took your call. You told me you are near broke and cannot afford to do anything but your own DIY provisional filing. I told you that the $249 package search offer was a down-payment on and part of a 50% reduced fee Utility patent package for micro/small entities. And I specifically told you not to order it and instead pointed you to our micro-entity reduced fee, stand-alone basic search for $275 ($550 normal fee schedule). You then went on to say that “our webpage said ‘No obligation‘ so what is to stop me from just telling you a different ‘intent’ and taking advantage of that $249 deal”. I told you that you did not qualify for the flat-fee package offer because you said you had no financial ability to follow through with the Utility patent package if we did a good job and it was favorable to move forward. You said, “well we’ll see about that, I’ll just order it”, and later on you actually did ordered it in defiance of what you were expressly otherwise told. This behavior is consistent with a trouble maker, and your later abuse of Yelp to coerce/harm us with false “SCAM” accusations further confirms it.

What you don’t seem to understand, or care about, is that $249 is a big loss-leader offer that is meant to help individuals and very small businesses, who most often cut-corners. Where if the first step was not very low cost and low risk, they would, to save money, most of the time skip the more costly full comprehensive patent search, legal opinion/consult. The USPTO has a very high rejection rate of patent applications because they have expert Examiner searchers and advanced search (called EAST) systems in their offices (and certainly not the very limited free patent search engine they put on their website for the public). When we charged the regular $1500 full search/opinion cost we found individuals/very small businesses would avoidthe costly professional search/legal opinion, and just do their own, never find anything very close, and jump strait to having us to the patent app. Nearly always, those would get strong rejections at the USPTO and those clients would complain against us for doing a bad job not getting it allowed, when in fact had we done a solid search and legal analysis beforehand we would have found prior art patents ahead of time and most often ‘red-light’ the project or creatively adjust the invention design and patent app to avoid the problem prior artbecause we have a DC office where we can physically go to the USPTO to do our research on their EAST system and we employ former Patent Examiners; i.e., using their same systems and expert personnel.

This pattern by individuals was very bad for our long-term reputation. So, we had to find a way to get individuals to do full search/opinion before diving into doing a patent. As anyone in the business knows, nearly all the regular fees for patent searches go to the research, very little profits for the patent firm. Initially, we tried offering to do the search/opinion for free and obligating people to do the patent if favorable, but too many were afraid of that. Then we tried to obligate people to the full $1500 search/opinion/consult price if the search results were not favorable, but still too many were afraid of paying upfront for that, so most still just did their own searches. So, to break the deadlock, we decided to shift most of the risk (of losses) towards us, and offer a low $249 down payment to get that $1500 search/opinion/consult combo as part of the reduced $3500 flat-fee patenting package, and offer no obligation, which you tout as a loophole for you to take advantage of. We picked the $249 level because it was high enough for us to have some confidence that the inventor was serious, but not too high that Individual/small biz inventors would opt to just do the search themselves thinking they could do almost as good. It was a great success; however, the only way this system can work for us is if our prospective clients are honest and good faith to not wrongfully take advantage of this loss-leader offer, like you did. Very fortunately, people like you are the rare exception.

Sincerely yours,
Abby