Bay Area IP Group, llcReviews of bayareaip.com

Response from Bay Area IP Group, llcDec 10, 2025

Your edited update demonstrates your continued pattern of lying. For example, you say "The USPTO claim is open"; however, 37 C.F.R. § 11.34(d) specifies that the USPTO must file a complaint or close the case w/in one year after the date receiving a grievance, which proves you are lying b/c you filed your meritless complaint in 2022. Hence, you are in a very small (under 5) club that we are calling liars. We completed our contracted work for you in 2021. So, why are you now lying about us 4 years later? Also, you made all of these false accusations in your complaint to the USPTO over 3 years ago, and they rejected all your allegations and close the case back then. So, even the USPTO affirmed your wild complaints of fraud, no work, and unethical behavior are false and/or have no credibility. Also, the fact that you did not later seek mediation also confirms that your allegations have no credibility and that should be generally disregarded. Yet, you repeat those same defamatory lies here, in violation any kind of decency and of the non-defamation terms of our service agreement, which lies are not protected by free speech. As the USPTO determined, we properly did our patent drafting work that you contracted us to do, yet you decided at the last minute not to have us file it because of patentability concerns we warned you about during the patent search process. Throughout the process Ariel offered to consult with you at his hourly rate agreed upon. Yes, he does not work for free. So, it is unreasonable for you to expect otherwise. You are the one that refused to pay for his time for the patentability opinion you later requested, which was clearly not included in our flat-fee patent preparation quote. Also, you are misinformed. We employ a mix of patent agents and attorneys, depending on the type, needs, and budget goals of the client. Our attorneys are typically more sensible for work on high budget, corporate cases/clients. That is, we have a mix of patent Attorneys and Agents, which enables us to have the range skills and labor cost to optimally fit the budget and legal quality needs of clients ranging from big budget Fortune 500 companies, to low budget individuals needing basic minimal cost patent filings, which Attorney labor is usually too costly for. In this way, we can use lower cost agents to do the bulk of the routine work and Patent Prosecution Lawyers/Attorneys to do the value-added final high skills “polishing”/strategy work. For the past >20 years, this formula has uniquely provided the best value (legal quality vs cost) to our clients, and is actually one of our big advantages over Attorney-only firms.

Response from Bay Area IP Group, llcSep 1, 2021

Morison Livingston, this is Abby. Everything you say is untrue and/or false; e.g., you continue to say we did not deliver our draft patent to you, despite my 3 times emailing you the work product of our service that you ordered. Obviously, you are committed to an unreasonable, bad faith path calling us a "Scam", when you are the one that refused to pay for our work properly and timely done. Obviously, you are not telling the truth. That is, if I/we were actually ‘Scam’, yours would not be the only post accusing this, there would be dozens, if not 100s, in our 20+ years of patent prosecution legal work serving well over 2000 clients in that time. Moreover, as licensed member of the US patent bar for ~20 years, we never once received any such or similar complaint. In fact, what you complain about is a contractual obligation you had to pay us for legal work done, which applies no matter what firm you go with, thus revealing your general lack of awareness/knowledge, and/or a malicious intent to defame as retribution for a possibly poor outcome in your personal business financing situation. That is, you demanded by phone we rush our work, but 2 weeks later had a change of heart because your partner backed out of your business deal, so you are in bad faith, based on no fault of ours. Thus, your reason for cancelling and this Yelp flame are not an issue with our work, business practice, or contract. You want us to work for free because of your business changes. That is unreasonable, and bad faith. Nothing unfair has occurred. You ordered a service and signed a contract. Like any adult, under the law, you are obligated to the terms of that contract, which are reasonable. The contract has clear terms about fees/bills upon termination; moreover, we did our work (sent to you 3 times), and must be paid for it. Again, the work we done was very timely and according to your order and requests, being done w/in 10 days and delivering our first draft to you w/in 3-4 weeks as quoted. As you can see, you were fully informed, and agreed to these fees. Moreover, because we already prepared (and later delivered) our draft spec for filing all cited fees are due if/when you terminated. We have made no empty promises or false advertisements, and have done everything according to our quote and our contractual obligations. You, on the other hand, are seeking to breach your contractual obligations, so have no standing in any of your claims, as I’ve pointed out above. Our contract which you agreed to clearly stipulates your obligations, or work, and our billing, exactly as I have set forth to you, which you are trying to renege upon, thus breaching our contract, in bad faith. Moreover, because we already prepared (and later delivered) our draft spec for filing all cited fees are due if/when you terminated. These are all perfectly legal and proper fees. However, you are certainly free to file a complaint to the USPTO. We are confident they will agree with our position. The work we done was very timely and according to your order and requests, being done w/in 10 days and delivering our first draft to you w/in 3-4 weeks as quoted. You are the one who had a change of heart because your partner backed out of your deal, so you are in bad faith, based on no fault of ours. Irrespective of your late termination, we had already done our work by then, which we sent you. So, we carried out our contract that you ordered, irrespective of you later changing your mind. Hence, you are trying to breach the terms of our contract and your original order instructions. Hopefully, you plan to be civil, reasonable, and file a free complaint to the USPTO. We are confident they will agree with our position. Obviously, if they had any merit, given that we are licensed/registered under the patent bar for past ~20 years, you would have simply filed a free complaint with the USPTO if we did anything at all unethical or unjustly took your money, which is not OK by USPTO rules. Anyone can verify that we have not ever had any such USPTO complaints, which validates that we are very ethical and “legit”. So, given that you only resort anonymous 1 star flames, means there must have been circumstantial factors that left you unhappy, but nothing unethical on our part.

Response from Bay Area IP Group, llcSep 1, 2021

Steven, upon researching, we discovered that you were not telling a true story. You lack of understanding of patent and their process seems to be the source of all your unwarranted fears and jumping to wrong conclusions as to quality. You said: “Another patent attorney confirmed my opinion. They said bayareaip made several mistakes, including simple wording and phrasing in my patent incorrect and would never be accepted by USPTO. Bayareaip got alot of the basics wrong.” However, it was not your opinion or any attorney’s opinion, as it came from the USPTO Examiner’s review in the First office Action, where the Examiner found no quality problems at all in the specification, which is the most critical part of a patent. As we point out below, the Examiner pointed out a few trivial claims typos, which always get amended/corrected in the examination process. So, no big deal as you fear. Things the Examiner cited like "comprise of" vs "comprising" have no harm in litigation as there meaning is obvious to those skilled in the art, so not a quality issue even if it was not caught and corrected. Also, note that you reviewed that and did not catch it either prior to filing. Re quality, that is not what you said when we filed your case. You happily approved our final draft with “minor revisions”, and were pleased with the over 30 creative and patent strengthening questions/improvements we made to your original submission, with *no complaints* of errors/problems what-so-ever, and a year later you never replied to my email asking to back up your accusations. So, you are not being truthful when you say "I expressed my complaints." Your case had no deadlines and you are wrong about what are actual quality issues in patents. We now see that what really happened is that a year later when the 1st OA came, you gave up on patenting your invention, as no response was ever filed letting your patent go abandoned, yet a few weeks beforehand you tried to change Power of Attorney to yourself, not another attorney. Looks likely you ran out of money or interest, and are lashing out your personal issues on us. Your only legit gripe is the unfortunate delays to our work and communication problems- due to COVID lockdowns mandated in SF & out of our control. That is, unfortunately for everyone, San Francisco was ordered into COVID lockdown starting mid-march, which forced our offices to close, and put our human resources in a complete disarray from then on. As a result, we lost some key workers and our whole workflow got severely backlogged for most of that year, as it was near impossible to higher/train new workers. I see that that we finished our first draft work internally in April, yet lacking sufficient paralegals I see that it was not actually emailed to you until June. Based on your later revision, we got your our Final draft to you in August, and filed it soon after you approved and paid balance for filing. Obviously, this was an extraordinary pandemic situation we all were dealing with. Our normal turn times range from 1-2 months, not the 6 months you experienced. So, of course, is/was not our normal service, goal or original intention. Obviously, if this was not a one-off, fluke situation there would be literally 100s of similar angry clients posting one star complaints, not just yours. You paid “Top” level, so if you did not get that, you would have complained back then, not a year later when some opportunistic attorney trying to get your new business tells you that it was a “low quality job” b/c “All claims are rejected” and a couple trivial typos in the claims. Anyone who knows anything about patent process knows that nearly all patent apps are initially rejected, and later get allowed upon proper legal responses/amendments. As outlined above, what is really behind your laundry list of complaints and personal attacks is that you just gave up on your patent, as clearly stated in your 7/7/21 email where you simply said “I paid for the top...I’m disappointed…Every claim was rejected. My device is fairly simple…” Re “I brought these issues to Bay Area IP”, that is not true. We asked you examples about what you mean and you never replied, then unfairly posted your Yelp flame on us. Obviously, the root of it all is your extreme misunderstand what is patent quality and normal process, running out of money, which had you giving up, angry then prospected another attorney who played into your lack of knowledge/anger to get your office action response business. So, of course, your complaints are not representative of our work, and “Bayareaip got alot of the basics wrong” is completely untrue, and our claims exactly matched the scope/structure you requested. Obviously, if it was, over our ~20 years, there would be literally 100s of similar angry clients posting one star complaints, not just yours. Re drawings, our quote incl. 5 drawings; however, you submitted 15. We should have bill extra for the legal drafting work to cover that many extra drawings, @$100/ea. However, to help make up for of our delays, I let that go. Also, you are the one who had asked us to file with informal drawings, and never later asked us to formalize any drawings, b/c the USPTO accepted the informal one. We offered to formalize any 5 of the ones you select, but you never answered. So, more false understandings/representations from you. Re your Personal Attacks, he goes by his short name b/c many people, like you in Kentucky, were having a hard time saying his foreign name. So, makes it easier for them. Obviously, I link to my USPTO reg. info on my bio page, so silly and mean spirited that you pretend I’m trying to be deceitful. Also, we do not list last names of employees for the same reason you posted anonymously, b/c there are too many crazy & violent people these days to put our people at personal risk when simply doing their jobs. While your frustration w/ our COVID related delays is very understandable, we are personally very disappointed that you did not have a true dialog with me/us before you irrationally and publicly reacted in anger to routine things that get easily favorably resolved in the normal process. Kindly yours, Abby POC Senior Paralegal

Response from Bay Area IP Group, llcJul 24, 2021

Dear Mario, You are misinformed. We employ a mix of patent agents and attorneys, depending on the type, needs, and budget goals of the client. Our attorneys are typically more sensible for work on high budget, corporate cases/clients. That is, we have a mix of patent Attorneys and Agents, which enables us to have the range skills and labor cost to optimally fit the budget and legal quality needs of clients ranging from big budget Fortune 500 companies, to low budget individuals needing basic minimal cost patent filings, which Attorney labor is usually too costly for. In this way, we can use lower cost agents to do the bulk of the routine work and Attorneys to do the value-added final high skills “polishing”/strategy work. For the past ~20 years, this formula has uniquely provided the best value (legal quality vs cost) to our clients, and is actually one of our big advantages over Attorney-only firms. Kindly yours, Abby

Response from Bay Area IP Group, llcDec 4, 2017

Response from Abby (POC Paralegal): We strive to make every client happy; however, you defiantly ordered the $249 packaged research/opinion/consult service with 50% reduced $3500 flat-fee Utility offer for micro-entities, which, by your own admission to me, you did not qualify for b/c you said that you could not afford it. Hence, you acted in bad faith, against our clear instruction not to order it, and you further did not follow our automated instruction (and common sense) to confirm we even got your disclosure submission and/or if work was docketed. Everything you complain about here stems from this, your original wrong doing. Without giving us chance at all, you called us in a yelling tirade, demanding superiors, and same day posted your Yelp flame, even lying at one point that we were “TOTALLY A SCAM”, trying to force us to render service you wrongfully ordered and did not even confirm email received. This extremely aggressive, confrontational approach you have is contemptible behavior that no patent firm, including ours, should have to tolerate, especially when you engaged us in bad-faith as you did. It is such ‘bad apples’ that have forced most reputable patent firms to avoid dealing with individuals, and give individual inventors a bad reputation in the legal community. The $249/$3500 offer webpage you ordered the search/opinion first step on specifically says: “Get a Full Patent Search included with the below $3500 flat-Fee Patent Application Offer. Pay only $250* now- balance becomes credited later. However, No-obligation. ” See where it says ‘with’ in “Search included with the below $3500 flat-Fee Patent Application Offer” that is what I told you and you knowingly ignored to take advantage of us trying to help good-faith individual inventors to afford doing a full search/opinion/consult before making the big decision to do a Utility patent application. Bad apples like you can mess it up for all the others. To be very clear: No one should order our $249 Utility package offer search unless they can afford the Utility patent package and intend to promptly file it upon favorable results, even if not with us. That is how package special offers work. We checked your Yelp profile and apparently you are a very opinionated Yelper with a history of reactively giving companies wrongful 1-star reviews, apparently as a means to attack; for example, you posted this about a Mexican restaurant that you simply could not afford: “I try not to write negative reviews, but I can't help it. This place is awful. The main terrible thing is the prices. … There's so much great Mexican food in SF. Don't bother with this place unless you are on an expense account.” So, you said they had good food and service; however, just because the prices were higher than you could afford you chose to use Yelp as an attack weapon against them with a 1-star. We find this pattern is a gross misrepresentation of that establishment’s product/service and is accordingly an abuse of Yelp. Based solely on this history, we find your 1-star ratings have scant credibility and disserves the Trustpilot and Yelp community, and Yelp policy should ban such abusive ratings, instead of encouraging it. To correct your intentionally false accounts, here is instead what actually occurred: 1. You order a $249 package offer search in defiance of me telling you that you do not qualify and may not order it, and submitted your material on 10/24. 2. You got no confirmation from us that we received your email. For all you know it could have been blocked as SPAM and never actually received and processed. 3. You did not check if we got and were working on it until 6 days later on 10/30. 4. Unfortunately, our paralegal who processes submissions had a family emergency (her husband suffered a debilitating stroke) and only worked partial hours that week where, unknown to the rest of us, she did not docket some searches submitted in that time. We only learned of that issue when you much later emailed us on 10/30. Despite the fact our server sent you an auto reply instructing you to call us if you do not get an official confirm of work within 2 days, which YOU failed to do. Obviously, emails are not 100% reliable, and often get blocked by SPAM filters; so, it is only common sense that if you never get a confirmation that your email was received, and it was put in queue for work, that you should promptly call in to verify and status. As such, it is not true that we “Missed all the deadlines” as you claim. You missed the 2 day ‘deadline’ to check if we even got your email submission and that the work was docketed properly. However, even knowing all of this, you still never updated your flame Yelp post to reflect our unfortunate personnel problem circumstance, which is further evidence you are a bad-faith person just abusing Trustpilot and Yelp as your weapon. 5. When you called on 10/30 asking where is your search report you began screaming at Mai that we were late and not meeting our guarantee and demanding to talk to a supervisor. None was available at the time and you were acting very angry and would not let her get off the phone to answer another call coming in, so she just had to switch to the other line, and you were gone by the time she returned to your line. 6. On the same day, 10/30, and even before you alerted us to it not being docketed for work you post a 1-star flame Yelp post, not even giving us any chance/time to rectify our oversight you post multiple bad faith attacks, and then defamed us with the outright lie “DO NOT TRUST THESE SCAMMERS.”, fully knowing about our personnel issues that week and that we were putting it in queue for work right after your call. This is very bad form on your part. You did not give us the benefit of any doubt, and instead preemptively went on the full attack/defamation mode. That sort of confrontational, verbally abusive behavior does not deserve any compassion. If anything it is very provocative. Moreover, no-one should expect that we ought to concede to your demand to let you (yell at) our “more seniors” like you did to our paralegal about completely circumstantial things that were absolutely minor, and you actually had no rights to in any case given you defiantly ordered a package search service that I told you that did not qualify for. 7. We delivered our search report 6 days afterwards. 8. You were apparently pleased with the quality of our search results as you had no complaints and demanded our patentability legal opinion. 9. We refused to render further service to you because of our discovery that you ordered the package search in bad faith, behaved reprehensibly to us on the phone, and I told you that until you remove your outright lie “DO NOT TRUST THESE SCAMMERS” we refuse any further work, and will seek alternative remedies against you if you did not comply. 10. You admitted that your Yelp posted outright lied about us being scammers, and you promptly removed that from your post, but instead carefully reworded it to avoid being sued for lying by saying “I felt like…I was being scammed, … seemed like it could be a SCAM the whole time. Most of time, thought I was about to be ripped off…. SCAM ALERT!”, and even to this day, knowing we rendered competent and valuable research/ legal opinion services in good faith, you still refuse to edit those “SCAM” related things out of your Yelp flame post, which further reveals that your main, if not only, goal is vindictive retribution because we would not concede to your unreasonable and unfair demands. You originally called in asking about the $249 search/opinion offer, and I took your call. You told me you are near broke and cannot afford to do anything but your own DIY provisional filing. I told you that the $249 package search offer was a down-payment on and part of a 50% reduced fee Utility patent package for micro/small entities. And I specifically told you not to order it and instead pointed you to our micro-entity reduced fee, stand-alone basic search for $275 ($550 normal fee schedule). You then went on to say that “our webpage said ‘No obligation‘ so what is to stop me from just telling you a different ‘intent’ and taking advantage of that $249 deal”. I told you that you did not qualify for the flat-fee package offer because you said you had no financial ability to follow through with the Utility patent package if we did a good job and it was favorable to move forward. You said, “well we’ll see about that, I’ll just order it”, and later on you actually did ordered it in defiance of what you were expressly otherwise told. This behavior is consistent with a trouble maker, and your later abuse of Yelp to coerce/harm us with false “SCAM” accusations further confirms it. What you don’t seem to understand, or care about, is that $249 is a big loss-leader offer that is meant to help individuals and very small businesses, who most often cut-corners. Where if the first step was not very low cost and low risk, they would, to save money, most of the time skip the more costly full comprehensive patent search, legal opinion/consult. The USPTO has a very high rejection rate of patent applications because they have expert Examiner searchers and advanced search (called EAST) systems in their offices (and certainly not the very limited free patent search engine they put on their website for the public). When we charged the regular $1500 full search/opinion cost we found individuals/very small businesses would avoidthe costly professional search/legal opinion, and just do their own, never find anything very close, and jump strait to having us to the patent app. Nearly always, those would get strong rejections at the USPTO and those clients would complain against us for doing a bad job not getting it allowed, when in fact had we done a solid search and legal analysis beforehand we would have found prior art patents ahead of time and most often ‘red-light’ the project or creatively adjust the invention design and patent app to avoid the problem prior artbecause we have a DC office where we can physically go to the USPTO to do our research on their EAST system and we employ former Patent Examiners; i.e., using their same systems and expert personnel. This pattern by individuals was very bad for our long-term reputation. So, we had to find a way to get individuals to do full search/opinion before diving into doing a patent. As anyone in the business knows, nearly all the regular fees for patent searches go to the research, very little profits for the patent firm. Initially, we tried offering to do the search/opinion for free and obligating people to do the patent if favorable, but too many were afraid of that. Then we tried to obligate people to the full $1500 search/opinion/consult price if the search results were not favorable, but still too many were afraid of paying upfront for that, so most still just did their own searches. So, to break the deadlock, we decided to shift most of the risk (of losses) towards us, and offer a low $249 down payment to get that $1500 search/opinion/consult combo as part of the reduced $3500 flat-fee patenting package, and offer no obligation, which you tout as a loophole for you to take advantage of. We picked the $249 level because it was high enough for us to have some confidence that the inventor was serious, but not too high that Individual/small biz inventors would opt to just do the search themselves thinking they could do almost as good. It was a great success; however, the only way this system can work for us is if our prospective clients are honest and good faith to not wrongfully take advantage of this loss-leader offer, like you did. Very fortunately, people like you are the rare exception. Sincerely yours, Abby