Sports enthusiasts know that defense wins championships, but it is no less critical when it comes to business. Patent protection plays an essential role in any business's defensive strategy by preventing its competitors from making, using, or selling the valuable...

How healthy is your company's patent portfolio? Many large companies take a shotgun approach to patent prosecution - relying on numerous patent applications and sheer force to take each patent application from filing to grant. However, with so many...

The need for reliable and independent data is often at the center of any new invention. It turns out that data is a crucial asset to have on your side when trying to protect and defend the intellectual property rights related to that invention as well. “We might use...

Do you know how much money your firm or in-house department is spending on fees for filing extensions? Whatever the amount, it is likely too much— most extension fees can be wholly prevented through smart, data-driven organizational methods. By utilizing legal...

  The United States Patent and Trademark Office is rapidly approaching a significant milestone in its productive history of granting patents. Having issued the first patents back in 1790, the USPTO has, by virtue of its unique regulatory authority, been...

There’s no secret that the ability to protect valuable intellectual property can lead to much wealth. The costs of obtaining a patent securing that technology, however, are not always the topic of conversation once a research breakthrough has occurred. A good hard...

Companies in recent decades have been beleaguered by cyber espionage and theft of proprietary materials and trade secrets. Most states have statutes creating a cause of action for companies to seek redress for these wrongs but currently no parallel cause of action...

In the old days of patent prosecution, some IP attorneys would perform only a perfunctory prior art search—or forego a prior art search completely—with the rationale that determining whether a proposed invention infringed on prior art was the job of a USPTO patent...

The importance of sound, patentable claims in a patent application has always been important, but its importance has only increased since the implementation of first-to-file standard in March 2013 in the wake of the America Invents Act. Here are three tips for giving...

United States Patent Classification System has finally exited the realm of active classification schemes, following its European colleague ECLA into retirement. Its last day on the job at the USPTO was December 31, 2014. In its place, both the European Patent Office...

Even under the best of circumstances, planning a patent prosecution strategy that may help you secure a notice of allowance as quickly as possible is a challenging task. Every month, the USPTO uses the graphical dashboards at its Data Visualization Center website to...

Patent professionals today are under increasing pressure to prosecute patent applications successfully to help IP-driven companies gain an edge on their competitors. The data-driven reports available through the LexisNexis® PatentAdvisor℠ suite of patent software...

As ever more talent flows into the field of intellectual property law, firms trying to establish or maintain a customer base in this increasingly competitive practice area need tools that will give them a distinct edge over their rivals. LexisNexis PatentAdvisor®, a...