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Patent claims are numbered. So if a patent has claims 1, 2, 3 and 4, you can infringe on the patent if you practice even just one of the claims. However, a claim might have multiple steps in it. So if claim 1 has step a, b, c and d, you need to practice each and every step to infringe on that claim.

You can play with the wording and scope of the patents, you might even be able to hide them a little, but a good patent search will most probably reveal them to your competitor after he knows of one of them. And you have to be careful not to reveal anything in one patent that would impede one of the other patents from beeing granted. If you are ready to ...

First of all you should consider whether the technical feature you are referring to is necessary for the definition of your invention, maybe you can claim your invention without any such feature. In the event that it should be part of the claimed subject-matter, you should try defining it in a generic way so that all the alternatives are encompassed. For ...

Yes, It is possible for both the firms to be the applicant for a single invention. They will be considered as joint applicants. Name of both applicants will reflect in the patent if granted.

What you are talking about is called "unity". In most patent offices (in all of them I would guess) a set of claims must relate to a single general concept. If not, the applicant is required to keep only part of it. The reason behind this is that for different inventions different searches are required (and they are not willing to do it when you pay for only ...

A patent can, and should, describe several embodiments. The preferred embodiment must be described, but it is not necessary, or even desirable, to state which embodiment is preferred. You must not try to hide a preferred embodiment by obscuring it with excessive numbers of other embodiments. Multiple embodiments are helpful for supporting broad claims to ...

If the features all apply to a single base product, it would be significantly less expensive and probably less troublesome to file a single application. Please note that the 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank Supreme Court decision effectively eliminates patent protection for many kinds of "software" inventions under a revised understanding of 35 USC 101.