At 82, patent attorney David Wolf is too busy to retire
By Henry Stimpson
Boston patent lawyer David Wolf, 82, still regularly gets patents for his clients, including himself sometimes. He recently obtained his 18th U.S. patent (7,520,808) for a lottery game.
Know those plastic lids with dimples that come on practically every takeout cup? The server presses the dimple so you know whether it’s root beer or ginger ale, coffee with sugar or without inside. Wolf patented that. He also patented a self-ventilating roller skate.
“Once you’ve been bitten by the invention bug,” he says, “you don’t want to stop,.”
Wolf is a shareholder in the Boston intellectual property law firm Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C., which was founded by his father, Ezekiel in 1927, the same year Wolf was born.
Most people are retired at his age, but retirement — he jokes he’d be a menace on a golf course — holds little appeal for him. Wolf likes earning a living and enjoys mentoring young lawyers. But what really keeps him going is that he loves solving problems, whether it’s his own or a client’s.
“I have a lot of fun doing it,” he says. “It’s a personal challenge to help inventors develop their ideas.”
If a client’s idea has potential but Wolf knows that it’s flawed, he thinks about creative ways to fix it. Yet he wants the client to feel it’s their solution, not Wolf’s. So he asks the client a lot of questions. “I give him a series of challenges and questions that direct him to alternate solutions,” he says.
That kind of collaboration between a lawyer and an inventor is unusual but fruitful.
“We did a lot of work around the kitchen table at Dave’s house,” says client Saul Palder, inventor of Smart Spin, a hot-selling patented carousel system for storing food containers. Palder, who happens to be the same age as his lawyer, adds, “Dave Wolf has the compassion to listen to an inventor with an idea and not whack him with a big bill. He’s simpatico and really understands what you’re doing.”
Wolf commutes to work every day with his son, Doug Wolf, a prominent trademark lawyer who’s also a shareholder at Wolf Greenfield.
“He’s always thinking about solutions, constantly coming up with ideas,” says Doug Wolf. “It’s a practical solution to some problem at the home or office that you may not even recognize as a problem. He approaches legal work that way. If he has to tell a client ‘no,’ he always adds, ‘Have you ever thought of…’ He’s always thinking outside the box.”
While the patent system has gotten more complex and expensive, it’s nevertheless far superior to what existed years ago, David Wolf says.
“Intellectual property rights and the development of patent protection have become more important than ever before,” he says. “All you need to do is compare the value of IP assets today versus 50 years ago. The joke was the only good patent is one the Supreme Court had not seen.
“Since then, we’ve had major changes in attitude, including the creation of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Companies recognize patents as a real source of potential income. IBM has something like $1.5 billion in royalty income.” Patents, trademarks and copyrights have become valuable property, as chattels and real estate. It is now estimated that intellectual property royalties have increased in the U.S. from $15 billon in 1990 to about $500 billion in 2005.
And with the export of many manufacturing jobs overseas, innovation is the main thing that the United States has to sell—and strong patent rights are crucial to protecting new ideas.
Wolf says that the state of innovation is “reasonably healthy,” but he’s worried that high costs are hurting inventors.
Particularly troubling are annual patent-maintenance fees that didn’t exist in the past. “You have to think twice before you keep a patent,” he says, and indeed Wolf has abandoned a few of his old patents.
“It reduces the compensation for inventions and the incentive,” he says of the ongoing fees. “You don’t need to build a better mousetrap if you can just take someone else’s abandoned patent.”
But then again, he’s never made money from his own patents. “I gave many of them to clients,” he says. For instance, he gave the drink lid patent to Sweetheart Plastics, a client at the time.
But now he wouldn’t mind cashing in on his lottery patent. It has 10 numbers, and he says they could be arrayed like a baseball team with nine players, plus the designated hitter.
Wolf has three more ideas in the works: an improvement on the lottery game, a consumer product to ease the lines of catheters and perhaps a hair clip.
While Wolf doesn’t golf or take long vacations, he isn’t all work and no play. He also is a watercolor artist whose works have been exhibited in various shows.
This article appeared in our January 2010 print edition.
