We received our official Design Patent from the USPTO a couple of days ago. We were notified a couple of months ago that it had been approved and it took 2 months to get the official booklet. It's pretty cool to know that your forever a part of history. Design Patents are relatively easy to do and fairly cheap. I think overall with using an Attorney it was around $600.00. It would have been more, but my wife did the patent drawings. There are books that specifically address how to draw patent drawings and she followed them along with some advice from the attorney. We were trying to squeeze more than one design in because our crystals we make that sit on top of the monster basher light base are similar, but the USPTO said we had to pick one design, so that's what we did.
I would recommend that you work with an attorney even doing the simpler Design patent. We would have made it much more complicated than it had to be and might have cost us more because of all the re-submitting we would have had to do in response to issues raised by the USPTO.
The Attorney we used was Antonio Papageorgio from Ostrow Kaufman in New York. He was great and we never felt rushed when talking to him on the phone. He explained everything to us and we felt like we were very lucky to have found him. If your thinking of filing for a Patent, whether Utility or Design, I would recommend you at least talk to him.
