If your invention is well defined and you know its advantages, disadvantages and what  similar technology might be cited against it by a patent examiner, then you may be ready to ask your attorney to draft a patent application.   However, many inventors are by no means prepared to describe their inventions in such detail.   Often what an inventor has discovered is a new technology which will enable the creation of multiple inventions requiring multiple patent applications.   Filing a patent application at this point is pre-mature.  It is first necessary to define the multiple inventions created by the new technology and then to decide in what order to develop them.  This kind of strategizing is not something that the typical patent attorney does, which is why attorneys and agents refer clients to companies like Business Metamorphosis.

When I was at the Systems Concepts Center at Eastman Kodak we described a new technology and the inventions that it might spawn as an "Alpha Space".   I later likened this idea  to a Chocolate Chip cookie.   Where the space was the cookie and the individual inventions were the chips.   

Many companies,  such as Kodak ask inventors to prepare an "Invention Report" before contacting the attorney.  With a well written report, which documents the information that went into creating the invention, the attorney is in a strong position to do what is the meat of any patent application, craft the patent claims in legal language.

At BML we  write invention reports and we also edit them.  We prefer to do this after a patent search has been performed because we can then take into account the prior art that is likely to be cited against the  invention and provide alternative for the attorney to use.

For example, I once had a client that had invented what he thought was a new kind of bug sprayer.   In our patent search we found one that looked nearly identical to his invention.  But we didn't advise the inventor to give up.  We asked him one of our favorite questions. If you saw the other inventors product and yours side by side in a store, why would  it be yours that you would buy.   He had a ready answer.  He said, "because mine would cost half as much".   We then focused the invention report and the resulting patent application on the cost advantage and the inventive features that produced it.