Although this is generally true of Legal's recommendation to all engineering development, it is often not possible. In particular, once you start writing your own patents (or having counsel write and you approve) then you'll have to answer questions about prior art, if anything is even close. At that point you have to at least read and respond to counsel's questions about particular patents and that means reading the spec, and usually the claims to understand them. At least those conversations are privileged, but that doesn't mean you don't have to answer in court.
The only reason this is really recommended is to avoid triple damages as opposed to simple damages. Depending on what you're working on, it's value and your investment, it may well make sense to look at patents... but for a large company it's usually patent lawyers working for you. In general, it's not a great idea to just go reading lots of only vaguely related patents and documenting it without purpose, because you would increase liability with minimal gain.
Furthermore, if you've read a patent and then come up with a great patentable idea, they can further claim more easily that your invention wasn't novel and was obvious from combining some other art with that patent, thus invalidating it. Having a good story about how you came up with the idea is important on the stand. Patents are boring and there's risk so mostly avoid it.
> In particular, once you start writing your own patents (or having counsel write and you approve) then you'll have to answer questions about prior art, if anything is even close.
Yes. I have found that pursuing patents is an enormous time-suck; it is a complete distraction from actually inventing things, and should be regarded as a major risk to your productivity.
Filing patents may suck for you, but it's not like, BigCorp who pays your salary is going to let you out of it. If you're creating something unprotected by copyright (eg physical), and don't completely control the means of production, then not having a patent means your invention/productivity is likely worthless due to competition anyway.
By the time you could have a product made, your manufacturer could simply make more and sell at a lower price those you receive nothing for. It's really common for kickstarters, and you can try splitting up the manufacture or adding little software bits to control it, but there's a reason patents on the creation of physical objects exist.