Intellevate CEO Leon Steinberg observed, "We find mistakes on everything from leaving out portions of the patent claims to putting in the wrong drawings, to spelling mistakes."

Spelling errors can be significant. For example, one case of a chemical patent with an incorrectly spelled compound, which happened to be another substance, so, in effect, the applicant referenced the wrong chemical.

Intellevate said that 56% of the mistakes can be attributed to the USPTO, with the other 44% owing to the prosecutor. 34% of Intellevate's proofread patents resulted in filing a Certificate of Correction.

Patent Hawk principal Gary Odom lamented, "Aside from the specification gaffes, which do sometimes make for a bad day in court, there are a lot of major league stinkers out there. Not only do applicants often skirt a patentability search, patent owners don't even bother to vet their patents for validity before sallying forth to the courthouse in high happy hopes of a payday. And I'm not talking Mr. Wizard Smallfry or Patent Troll LLC, where slim to no vetting may be understandable; I mean Fortune 500 companies bashing their competitors, where lack of resources is clearly not an issue."

Patent Hawk offers patentability searches on a $500 limit, often charging clients $300 or less for such work. Validating patents for potential litigation plaintiffs costs a couple thousand for a Patent Hawk vetting, but could save hundreds of thousands in wasted attorneys fees. Yet few clients are plaintiffs.

Patent Hawk does a thriving business for defendants as a patent killer. "Frankly, attorneys lack the resources, especially manpower, but including ready access to various prior art databases, as well as practiced skill. Besides, their hourly rate is considerably higher, so it makes sense to outsource."

Intellevate has outsourced itself to India, and CEO Steinberg feels defensive about it - "One of the issues I am frequently faced with is, do I feel bad taking jobs out of the U.S. and taking them to India. And I say, absolutely not. Proofreading in the U.S. is something that no one wants to do. It's extraordinarily boring, mind-numbing work." No rise could be had about the tedium involved in prior art search from U.S. based Patent Hawk. "The devil's in the details. My bread-and-butter is looking for the devil."

Peter Zura has been picking nits with some silly projects related to patent quality: the academic "Patent Quality Index", and IBM's recently announced publicity campaign for open source prior art.