Providing patent search services to the legal community is the reason we are in business. We have reported to fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups but mostly we work with outside counsel. Our capabilities encompass the full scope of search products including:

Patentability / Prior Art / Novelty Search

Is research directed to finding evidence that can conceivably affect the patentability of an idea or innovation. Typically, the searcher limits the search to patents and published applications (foreign and domestic) but in some technologies can and should include non-patent literature. The standard for selecting references, when doing research with this objective, is anticipation. Would the hypothetical person having average skill in the art have come up with the invention based the material we provide?

Infringement/Clearance

The objective of an infringement or clearance search is to find in-force patents with claims that potentially could affect the legal use, sale or manufacture of a product or process. The search effort necessarily focuses on patent claims and is usually limited to unexpired US patents but can include both foreign and published applications if required.

Validity

A validity search is directed to the claims of a subject patent. The search strives to find any evidence that could potentially invalidate the claims of the patent. A validity search is historical in nature because the evidence must have been published prior to the filing date of the subject patent. A validity objective will almost always require searching non-patent literature.

Right-to-Use

A right-to-use search is an expanded infringement analysis. The search effort is expanded to find expired prior art evidence that is now in the public domain and therefore available for public use.

Due diligence

A due diligence project incorporates both infringement and validity objectives. These are typically done to evaluate a patent in the event of a purchase and are designed to identify possible infringement or validity problems.

How we report

We report in a simple narrative form. The report is divided into three separate sections: a search description; a discussion of each article of evidence found, in a table format; and a detailed description of our search strategy structured around the Manual of Classification hierarchy.