MOMII & ASSOCIATES was founded in May 2003 by Takafumi Momii on the belief that a patent law firm could provide its clients with the best quality and service when the firm keeps an appropriate size and concentrates on specific technical and practice areas. We have been steadily grown up while keeping quality, and presently, we are proud of being recognized as the highest quality patent law firm by all our clients, which proves that the belief was correct.

In order to keep the quality, we primarily handle the cases in the field of chemical-related technologies. By focusing on chemical-related technologies, we usually deal with the clients’ most complex and/or important cases. We handle such complex and important cases by closely communicating with each other in our firm as well as with the client, and consequently, we gain an in-depth knowledge of the technologies and the clients’ business. The in-depth knowledge of the chemical-related technologies and the clients’ business based on such practice and our legal expertise are combined to produce very high quality service. This circulation accumulates our technical knowledge and experience so as to further improve our service and quality. Such continuous improvement can be achieved only by our recruiting system that makes it possible to hire a professional having sufficient technical background, good personality and communication ability. We have four patent attorney and two patent engineers who is studying for patent bar examination, all having advanced degree and industrial experience in chemical or biotechnology related field, having good personality and communication ability, and capable of fully understanding English, who realize the above-described continuous improvement.

Furthermore, we exclusively focus on patent drafting and prosecution, defending or challenging patents against the third party, providing opinion regarding infringement, validity and freedom to operate, as well as consulting clients. Although we handle opinion works in connection with litigation, we are not involved in the litigation to avoid dispersion of our professional ability. We believe this attitude provides high quality service in our practice area.

The firm’s position as described above also makes it possible to provide clients abroad with satisfactory and cost-effective service in Japan. The first reason is that we can reduce stress or difficulties you often encounter in communicating with Japanese patent law firms. Since we usually deal with Japanese clients’ most important cases, most of the Japanese patent applications we handle would then be filed worldwide. As a result, we have rich experience in filing and prosecuting patent applications in many countries so that we have learned cultural, linguistic and the patent law’s differences from Japan. Therefore, we have capability of not only smoothly communicating with clients in English but also providing the service in consideration of cultural, linguistic and the patent law’s differences between Japan and for example the United States or Europe. The second reason is that we do not only handle foreign clients’ cases. In other words, we usually conduct an interview with an inventor and originally draft claims and a specification based on the interview for Japanese clients, which gives us the ability to appropriately analyze a specification (even if it was prepared by others), an official action and prior art. Consequently, we prepare the Japanese translation as if we draft the specification when filing the application, and we provide the client with appropriate comments including several possible options and prepare an argument that do not reiterate the argument during the prosecution in the clients’ country but conforms to the Japanese practice when responding to an official action. Finally, since all the members in our firm are fluent of English, we need much smaller time to understand clients’ instruction letter and to prepare English letter directed to the clients. It contributes to reduction of the cost. We can proudly say that our quality and cost-effectiveness increases clients abroad.

Regardless of the size of a matter, and regardless of clients in Japan or in foreign countries, we are committed to delivering the highest quality services to achieve the clients' objectives. In order to carry out the commitment, we do not aim to become a large firm and will remain as a chemical “boutique” to keep quality.