Introdudction
| Maeda Patent Office is an international patent firm which has been engaged in intellectual property practice over 30 years in Japan. We offer a range of services to help our clients obtain and exercise intellectual property rights such as patents and trademarks through overall prosecution including application filing, trials and lawsuits. |
 |
Our firm was founded in 1977 in Osaka to support companies large to small in western Japan, mainly in so-called Kansai region (Osaka, Hyogo, Kyoto, Nara, Wakayama and Shiga), in dealing with procedures of domestic patents and trademarks.
Since our foundation, we have been actively engaged in representing many domestic clients before the Japan Patent Office and working with competent and experienced foreign firms to help domestic clients obtain strong intellectual property rights including patents and trademarks in foreign countries. We also have represented foreign clients before the Japan Patent Office for filling applications of patents, trademarks and design registrations and support them in obtaining strong intellectual property rights and exercising their intellectual property rights. We have expanded our activities in many regions in the world and have made efforts in engaging in global intellectual property business.
 |
We currently have over 120 staff members including 25 patent attorneys and can offer a full service to cover all areas in intellectual property prosecution. Our technical staff members are highly knowledgable about latest and advanced technologies and experienced in prosecution of international patent applications (PCT applications) and international trademark registration (Madrid Protocol applications). |
  |
We also have staff members who are fluent in a variety of languages such as English, Chinese, Korean, German and French and thus we can correspond to clients’ requests in original languages. |
In particular situations, documents in the original language are easier to understand and it is preferable to handle documents in the original language. We are confident that we can provide satisfactory services to our clients by handling documents in original languages. Specifically, we have seven native speakers of foreign languages as in-house staff members. We deal with a considerable number of patent applications and trademark registration applications from China and Korea as well as applications in English from US, Europe and other English speaking countries.
To offer our services to help our clients obtain broad and strong intellectual property rights not only in Japan but around the world and further to contribute to development of corporate culture with high competitiveness, we strive to increase our capacity and stimulate intellectual curiosity of individual staff members and thereby provide highly quality services to our clients.
In this regard, we spare no effort for training of intellectual property professionals. Senior attorneys supervise newly joined attorneys and technical staff members on one on one basis to train them until they reach a certain level to provide quality service to clients. We also have the system to regularly send senior attorneys overseas for training purpose to be able to provide the latest and useful information to our clients.
In our system, each staff member has responsibilities of multiple-clients’ cases – basically, three or more clients’ cases. We believe that we can understand technology of each client more deeply and also broaden our view point through working with several clients. Through encounters with various different inventions, each staff member deals with cases from a broad viewpoint and improves his/her ability to provide advices to clients and further highly quality services.
For the purpose of brushing up on our knowledge and skill and providing latest and useful information to our clients, we organize study groups led by senior attorneys. In study group sessions, study group members bring new information and “know-hows” that they found through the daily practice and seminars outside the firm. Collected information is presented and shared throughout the firm and also provided to our clients if it is useful to them.
With all these efforts, we enjoy a strong reputation as high-quality patent firm, particularly, in the fields of mechanics, mechatronics, control engineering, etc. Currently, more than half of our attorneys have expertise in these fields.
In our firm, we use our own computer system to manage data and information of each client on computer basis and, at the same time, our document management team consisting of competent and experienced document management staff members manually check data and information from/to each client in parallel. We do not rely on only computer system but use this double-check system using online and off-line systems to manage confidential data and information of our clients.
