Before you give the responsibility of patenting and marketing your idea to any firm you should yourself be absolutely clear about the following areas:

1. Do the firm’s services include patent searching/ application/ marketing / licensing?
2. The number of ideas/ inventions that have been evaluated by them in the past, say 5 years, and those which were given positive evaluations.
3. The number of customers that signed in with them in the same period i.e. 5 years. This would be excluding those that chose non-marketing services.
4. The number of customers that received net financial profit resulting directly from the firm’s promotion services.
5. The number of customers that received license agreements resulting directly from the firm’s promotion services.
6. The firm or its officers may have been affiliated with other invention promotion companies in the past. Ask them for the names and addresses of all such previous associations in the past 10 years.
7. Take the details of any upfront fee charged by the firm and what services it offers against that fee. Also ask them for an estimate of how much the whole process would cost from submitting the idea to getting the patent and licensing agreement.
   
8. Whether the firm has been investigated by the Better Business Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, the Attorney General’s office in any state, or any other consumer protection agency in the past. Is there a history of any complaint being filed against the firm with the US Patent and Trademark Office under the Inventor Rights Act? If something like that did happen get the details including the outcome.
   
9. Who will be selecting and paying the patent attorney or agent for doing the patent search, patentability opinion, and patent application preparation? Is the patent attorney going to use a search firm to do the patent search and how many applications does a single attorney handle? 
10. Will the firm be providing a written opinion regarding the marketability of the invention?

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