Complaint Review: Invention Home

James Ray & Associates along with Jacob Enterprises worked together on my idea. I am looking at an invoice from Invention Home for the Patent Search, Provisional Filing Fee, Prov Patent- Special2, Invention Portfolio (Marketing) was $2,999.00, which in the rebuttle has been posted as free and commission only; Audio Commercial, Provisional Filing Fee, Provisional Patent Prep & Porfolio Custom Work- All totalling $4,812.00. In addition, the law firm affiliated with Invention Home, James Ray & Associates, charged me $4,591.00 to file the Utility Patent. I have been fortunate enough to get in touch with Apple Inc & the USPTO's Patent Examiner's Department who are looking into this. I will update my progress.
How do you keep this from happening to you? Educate yourself. Be proactive. Find your own answers and affiliate yourself with companies that assist you with obtaining knowlegde. Knowledge is invaluable. I've had a great exxperience working with Inventright who educated me on doing my own patent search to find what I've found. Only good things happen when you apply knowledge. I was never educated on patents with Invention Home. Their Marketing chart is very vague and it's hard to determine whether their marketing team is making calls on behalf of your idea or generally everyone else's. In my 3 years I've never recieved a call saying they have a company reviewing my idea. In fact, I hired an outside consultant who had my idea reviewed 3 times. Brian Harding of The New Product Consulting. He always kept me in the loop with his progress and was thoroughly disappointed when he found out how much money Invention Home and James Ray and Associates took from me. The word he used was "Unnecessary".

Hello, I am the Director of Customer Operations for InventionHome.  Id like to address and clarify this post, which I believe is misleading and not a true reflection of the actual process or our business practice.
 
First, please understand that our company takes every situation like this very serious and we put a tremendous amount of effort and value into total customer service and satisfaction.  We work with inventors and entrepreneurs from all over the world and have working relationships with thousands of companies across North America who are looking for innovative products. Additionally, we have an extremely high customer satisfaction rating and we receive a tremendous amount of customer testimonials after going through our process.   We have already been in contact with this inventor to resolve the issue.  
 
In regards to this post, please consider the following
 
This post implied that over $9k was spent with our company on a patent application.  This is not true.  The actual services requested were far more than just a patent application and the overall expense for all of these services combined was less than half of the $9k posted.  Our company completed multiple services meeting the requirements and approval of the inventor including; a patent search, provisional patent application, invention portfolio website, virtual design images, virtual prototype with animation, custom design work and audio production.
 
Furthermore, this customer opted into our marketing and licensing program, which was available at no cost (commission only).
 
Unfortunately, the patent issue is not as black and white as the customer is making it to be.  First, there is a difference between patentability and infringement.  Infringement analysis is far more complicated and is not something that our company does or offers.  Therefore, to make a claim that the invention infringes another patent is not something that can be determined easily.  Next, the patent firm mentioned in this post is a completely separate company from ours.  Furthermore, one year after the original search, the inventor filed a non-provisional patent application with that patent firm and would have worked with them to re-evaluate whether to file or not.   
 
Finally, keep in mind that the patent application filed hasnt even been reviewed by the USPTO, which means it hasnt been accepted or rejected yet.