Further Details of Patent Studies:

Litigation Support

We have carried out successful invalidity patent searches to nullify the claims of patents asserted in potentially disastrous legal actions against our clients.

Often our clients become aware of the existence of a blocking patent only after the owner of the patent in question has made an approach with a perfunctory infringement complaint. A non-infringement opinion of counsel will not be sufficient in some cases and new key evidence must be produced in order to challenge the blocking patent itself. In such circumstances it is usually necessary to find prior art that invalidates the patentability of the blocking patent. Alternatively our client might have spotted a potentially blocking patent at the prosecution stage and is willing to file an opposition against an overly broad patent scope with the European Office or to file a request for re-examination in the United States.

The very success of such Validity search assignments critically depends on the ability to find all possible patent and non-patent literature evidence - sometimes a single document is enough to help invalidate the blocking patent. The invalidation strategy is quite difficult to master as most companies (including patent attorney firms) are not experienced in all-inclusive high quality patent searching. PatAnalyse uses its revolutionary technique for searching for patent information with a fully documented self-learning iterative approach and can warranty the best possible completeness of the search results. In addition, we are able to provide extra evidence by searching the Web of Science and InSpec on-line databases of scientific literature for non-patent prior art documents.

The results of such studies are represented as a Patent Map of most relevant published patents and non-patent documents followed by a PowerPoint presentation discussing individual documents which might form basic key evidence for the opinion of counsel as to the invalidity of the blocking patent in question. The report is aimed at assisting the patent attorney by eliminating the need for additional background investigative work.

On numerous occasions we have been able to find more than a dozen prior art documents in circumstances when the internal client’s IP department was failing to find even a single prior art document. We are so confident in our ability to find more relevant prior art documents than any other professionals, that we are frequently carrying out the litigation support projects on a success fee basis - charging only a nominal sum at the start of the project to establish a formal relationship and getting paid depending on the number of prior art documents identified by us that are actually used by our clients in the process of invalidating the asserted patents.