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[fb]

I notice there are many out-of-U.S. offers to draft and review U.S. applications; A lot are from India and Canada. If they are not registered with the PTO, how valuable might their work or opinions be?

Also, I would imagine they are not covered under the PTO agent/attorney non-disclosure rules.

[JimIvey]

I notice there are many out-of-U.S. offers to draft and review U.S. applications; A lot are from India and Canada. If they are not registered with the PTO, how valuable might their work or opinions be?

My guess is that they ghost-write; you'd take their draft and file it on your own, with or without your own amendments.

How valuable?  I have no idea.  You have some quality assurance using a US registered practitioner.  Just how much assurance can be debated.  However, outside of that, you really have no assurance of quality whatsoever. 

About a decade ago, there was a lot of talk of using offshore support to do exactly that, but for registered practitioner who would presumable assure the quality of the final product.  If you don't have some independent supervisor competence, I would recommend against using such off-shore/near-shore vendors.

FWIW, one of the reasons I never tried outsourcing like that, second only to worrying about product quality, was navigate US export controls.  We've discussed that somewhat recently in they context of foreign filing licenses.

Also, I would imagine they are not covered under the PTO agent/attorney non-disclosure rules.

Definitely not.  They might be covered by some non-disclosure rules -- probably in India or Canada, respectively.  But I have no knowledge of that.

Regards.

[bleedingpen]

the work-product is equivalent to something my dog left in the neighbor's back yard.  even with u.s. attorney supervision, it will take more time to clean up the heap of crap that the outsourced firms send you that the cost savings will be virtually erased.