Patent No.: 10,518,151 (get PDF)

Title: Method of Measuring and Mapping a Performance Variable of a Face of a Golf Club Head

Assignee: Taylor Made Golf Company, Inc.

Abstract: A method of measuring, recording, and mapping at least one performance variable of a face of a golf club head.

About Us: Sporting goods patents are in a league of their own and a unique set of skills and knowledge is required to be successful. To be frank, if you aren’t familiar with the patents of the leaders in your particular field, and equally as important – if your patent attorney isn’t, then you are likely to waste a lot of money to achieve mediocre results at best. Let’s face it, generally each field of sports is incredibly crowded from a patent perspective – in other words, a ton of patents have been issued over the years directed to the sport. Therefore, the shotgun approach to patent protection whereby an applicant just throws some spaghetti at the wall and sees what sticks is a horrible strategy. Gone are the days of sporting goods patent applications simply containing three pages of disclosure that read like assembly instructions you would receive in an Ikea box; because, if successful, the issued patent is rarely worth more than the paper upon which it is printed. Crowded fields, and simple inventions, generally require 50-100% more time and effort from a patent attorney in order to have a chance of obtaining good results. In fact, you and your patent attorney should discuss what “success” looks like before filing a patent application. For example, if you aren’t having discussions where your patent lawyer asks questions like “would allowance of dependent claim 5 feel like a win or a waste of money,” then you are likely already wasting money. Ultimately, like most things in life, you get what you pay for, and doing things “on the cheap” is rarely better than doing nothing at all because of false expectations of success. This is a field in which a clever patent prosecution attorney is worth their weight in gold, and if you think patent prosecution is a commodity service – you are living in the last century.