Alan J. Zell ⋅ Portland , OR Attitudes for Selling ⋅ 29 years experience

Jeremy, As others have said, eventually you'll need to work with a patent lawyer. It's a sloooooooow process. Once you have the patent pending in place, you will need, if you want to sell your product so some business, you will need to research the costs associated with going into production -- not that you may be doing the produduction but to understand what potential buyers or licensees will be looking at.

As to research if the there already is something too close to get a patent, you can go to USPTO.Gov and do it. Or, many libraries and some law schools have CDs to use. While you may not find it, by doing so, if you show the patent attorney what you have done, it will save you some money.

In addition, I suggest you conact the closest SCORE Chapter which offer free business consulting. Not all of the 400 chapters have members who have been patent lawyers, they may call on someone from other chapters who has this background. While SCORE members cannot practice law as you might need, they can guide you in your pursuit of getting the patent. Go to www.score.org, to the tab "find a local chapter" and put in your zip code. From this you will get the contact information for the closest chapter(s).

Good luck,

Alan

Alan Millner ⋅ Lexington , MA MIT ⋅ 40 years experience

It is well worth the effort to do your own patent search in advance of using a lawyer. Look on Google or other resources to find patents, papers, articles etc. bearing on your idea, and write up a summary showing how your idea fits into the state of the art and why your idea is not covered by what others have done. You can do this much more efficiently and less expensively than a law firm can do. Look at related patents to see how they are written, and put your own into a similar form so the law firm can use it without a lot of their own writing.

Christopher Ahlberg ⋅ Holtsville , NY Recorded Future, Inc. ⋅ 15 years experience

Most key advice of all Jeremy - do a provisional patent application. You can probably do that yourself - or get done "on the cheap" with a patent lawyer. Then work like h*ll over next 12 months to validate whether your idea matters. If it does matter, now spend the money on the full application.

Tom Cal, CFA ⋅ San Francisco , CA Army Veteran, Investment Manager ⋅ 25 years experience

Jeremy,
It's great to see your entrepreneurial spirit, creativity and inventiveness. Creativity and improvisation is an often overlooked asset of Veterans.

There are several prior discussions with some good advice.
see:
https://acp-advisornet.org/question/924/has-anyone-tried-to-patent-an-inventions-/p1

https://acp-advisornet.org/question/929/is-funding-available-to-manufacture-and-market-a-patent-pending-product-i-developeds/p1

https://acp-advisornet.org/search?Search=patent