have 1 at Patent Pending, two others that will be submitted this coming week.
I have several "Trade Secrets" which are basically non-detectable IP. I submit through my employer and the attorneys decide if it's a patent or a Trade Secret.
pretty simple. I met with a Patent Attorney, answered all his questions and submitted all the paperwork required. The Pat Pending is through my employer, so the legal firm they use is international and my attorney was in Singapore. The other two are through a private attorney, after my employer passed on the business idea. Those two are related, which saved me a little money on the patent research. I could have done my own research, but it would have risked IP for my employer and there's no way I would have done as thorough of a job as the person I hired. It's probably going to cost about $8k for the two, but I already have an NDA in place with a company that wants to license it, so it didn't hurt to spend the extra money on a pro - and it let me spend a lot more time on developing the product.