Business Opportunities Weblog

September 23, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 2 Comments

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Once a month in southeastern Wisconsin, three groups of inventors meet with people who want to help them.

At their core is a Milwaukee-area woman aiming to help change a culture.

Her name is Jill Welytok, a patent lawyer who grew up in Skokie, Ill., watching her dad invent the motion-sensitive fish that wiggles on a plaque.

Welytok’s dad never patented the wiggling fish, but he got enough response from ads in the back of magazines for his fish and other practical jokes and novelty items to make a decent living, she said.

Now Welytok, 49, is throwing herself into helping others do that and more.

“If you have a good product that you can produce, or that someone else can produce within the appropriate margins, you have access to a worldwide network for promoting it,” Welytok said.

Welytok is pounding on that message with what she says are more than 100 clients of the Milwaukee law firm she started in 2005, Absolute Technology Law Group LLC. She’s also hammering out her message at monthly meetings of three inventors and entrepreneurs clubs that meet in Mequon, West Bend and downtown Milwaukee.

Welytok says she takes just one of every five people who walk into her office as a patent client.

The clubs are a different story. They’re open to the public, and Welytok said she works hard to make them more than networking events by providing substantive and relevant information.

On average, 30 to 40 people attend each meeting, where experts discuss topics such as how to approach corporations with an invention, what kind of designs consumers are most apt to buy and ideas for funding their projects, she said.

Photo by Tom Lynn.

In Advice, Inventors, Patents | 2 Comments