Patent Prosecution
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Using Statistics to Gather Patent Examiner Intel
Patent professionals maintain an interesting relationship with their assigned patent examiners. From one perspective, it is perfectly amicable. Patent examiners are generally cooperative and unbiased; they stick to examining procedure, and even if the rejections they...
Adjusting for Analysis: Using Patent Examiner Clues to Predict Behavior
Patent statistics are important clues that help patent professionals better understand the nuances of effective patent prosecution. But clues, by definition, are just a small piece of a larger problem. They play an important role in developing patent prosecution...
Choosing the Best Path Forward After Receiving an Office Action
Costing clients roughly $3,000 apiece to deal with, office actions can quickly become one of the largest expenses in patent prosecution. Office action price tags do vary depending on the types of rejections made by a patent examiner and the amount of research and...
How to Compare Patent Prosecution Performances
Comparing the effectiveness of two patent practitioners can be like comparing apples to oranges. The success of a patent application is dependent on many factors that are beyond a patent practitioner’s control, which makes it difficult to evaluate their performance...
Analytical Pruning: Patent Tools for Healthier Patent Portfolios
A patent portfolio is a lot like a garden in many ways. Patent portfolios often contain many varieties of patent applications that are “planted” at different times. Each patent application needs to be nurtured, comes with its unique challenges and matures at its own...
Combining Tools for All Stages of Patent Prosecution
Research, drafting and prosecution are the three cornerstones of the patent process. How a patent professional approaches each cornerstone can have a significant impact on the expenses, durations and outcomes of their patent applications. Many tools have been...
Strategic Drafting With Patent Analytics Tools
There is a method to the madness of matching a USPTO patent examiner to each patent application. A lot happens before an examiner is assigned to a newly filed application. The USPTO first considers which team of examiners (called an “art unit”) is best suited to...
How Patent Analytics Can Improve Patent Prosecution Outcomes
Patent prosecution tactics are the decisions made by patent professionals to maneuver their patent applications through the patent process as efficiently as possible. Due to the nature of the patent process, implementing the right tactics at the right time is both an...
Patent Data as an Offensive and Defensive Strategy
Companies that fully integrate the management of their patent portfolio into their business strategy are often more successful and run more effective operations. Patent attorney Paul Hylarides believes that patent managers should be given a more prominent role in the...
Crystal Balls and Patent Analytics: Making Accurate Predictions in the Patent Process
Things might be different if we could see into the future. We would have notice of our future mistakes and could alter our actions to make the most of the days ahead. While there may not be a crystal ball that allows us to foresee the moments, months or years that lie...
How Signals picks up on market trends that everyone else is missing
Signals Analytics develops data tools for companies that are looking for profound insights on the latest market trends. LexisNexis’ raw patent data plays a crucial role in the powerful, predictive analyses they make. “Patent data is one of the most important signals...
The Queen’s Gambit: Making Small Upfront Sacrifices for Better Control of Patent Prosecution
There is an opening in chess called the “Queen’s Gambit” that contains a nugget of wisdom that applies to patent prosecution. In chess, a Queen’s Gambit involves sacrificing a queen-side pawn, which allows a player to secure control of the center of the board. In...
Myths of Litigated Patents
In the world of patent analytics, patent data serves two primary purposes. For one, it acts as a snapshot of the past, helping to show history in the form of patent statistics pertaining to the USPTO, patent examiners and patent applicants. The second key function of...
The Impact of Examiner Interviews on Patent Prosecution Outcomes
The value of holding interviews with USPTO patent examiners is often overlooked by patent professionals. When approached with a mindset of cooperativeness (as opposed to combativeness), examiner interviews enable more effective communication between patent...
The Hero’s Journey and the Four Champions of Patent Prosecution
Most people are familiar with the “hero’s journey.” Popularized by Joseph Campbell in the mid-twentieth century, it describes the common progression of the stages in literary or cinematic epics that our favorite heroes experience. There are 12 total stages in the...
Use Digital Briefcases for Patent Portfolio Analytics
When patent practitioners utilize patent portfolio management software the ways in which patent portfolios can be assembled and analyzed are practically endless. The LexisNexis PatentAdvisor® patent prosecution platform makes it easy for patent professionals to build...
Sophisticated Solutions for Patent Portfolio Management
The benefits of patent data and analytics are clear at every stage of the patent process. From helping patent prosecutors strategically draft patent application content to predicting a patent examiner’s next move in prosecution, having more information on hand leads...
Imagining More From USPTO Patent Statistics
The power of up-to-date, accurate USPTO patent statistics becomes apparent to many patent practitioners after only a short time in the trenches of patent prosecution. Having access to USPTO patent data and analytics features allows professionals to make more accurate...
Monitor Patent Applications and Portfolios From All Angles
A lot of time and energy is spent on patent monitoring. From monitoring for patent prosecution updates to monitoring the relative strength of patent portfolios over time, staying consistently up to date gives patent practitioners the power to keep their patent...
Take Control of the Patent Process
The patent process is rife with uncontrollable variables that are material to the outcome of patent prosecution—the most illustrative example is the predisposition of the patent examiner assigned to the case. The ability to manage and operate in uncertainty is a mark...
Five Election Patents that Shaped the Democratic Process
As great as the election processes of the United States are compared to those of many other nations, voting in the United States has always had room for improvement. Where there is room for improvement, innovation follows, and the five following United States Patent...
A Conversation With the Commissioner for Patents: Part 2
Earlier in 2020, LexisNexis® IP was honored to have USPTO Commissioner for Patents Drew Hirshfield join a webinar panel to discuss the state of the United States patent office. In our recent article, “A Conversation With the Commissioner for Patents (Part 1),” we...
A Conversation With the Commissioner for Patents: Part 1
If there is anything positive to say about the year 2020, it is that it has been a year of deep reflection with a desire to improve in all aspects of our lives. In the darkness of a global pandemic and a state of social unrest, opportunities have arisen to revise our...
Five Stages for Patent Efficiency
Patent applicants and professionals are in for the long haul when they enter patent prosecution, which typically unfolds over the course of several years. The silver lining of the lengthy patent process is that each subsequent stage presents an opportunity to use...
How to Easily and Objectively Prove Where Your Firm Outperforms the Competition
Market your firm to its fullest potential to prospective clients and earn more business from current clients with credible, third-party, objective data. Showcase your areas of expertise with the proprietary LexisNexis PatentAdvisor Efficiency Score™ and...
Patent Analytics for Predictions, Performance and Evaluations: Part 2
Click Here to Read Part One of This Series Patent analytics have opened the door for patent prosecutors and patent applicants to evaluate their patent examiners based on a variety of USPTO patent statistics. This allows them to develop superior patent prosecution...
How USPTO Examiner Type Affects Patents: Part 4
By Michael Sartori & Matt WelchLaw360 (August 21, 2020, 2:25 PM EDT)Patent procurement at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is affected by the type of examiner. We gathered data from the LexisNexis PatentAdvisor database for each year from 2009 to 2019, for...
Opportunities to Win with Patent Analytics
There are plenty of opportunities to win throughout the patent process. It begins with winning a potential client’s approval, and it hopefully ends with winning a granted patent and the client’s satisfaction. Along the way, everyone wins if prosecution goes smoothly...
Fast Examiners; Slow Examiners; and Patent Allowance
Although we know that individual patent examiners can greatly affect an inventor’s chance to (1) get a patent at all and (2) get it in a timely way, there has been very little work determining how examiners are able to either delay or compact prosecution while still...
Market Your Firm to its Fullest Potential with the New LexisNexis PatentAdvisor® Benchmarking Reports™
Market your firm to its fullest potential to prospective patent clients and earn more business from current patent clients with credible, third-party, objective data. Showcase your areas of expertise with the proprietary LexisNexis PatentAdvisor® Efficiency...
Patent prosecution is the process of drafting, filing, and working with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to establish a patent protection over the rights to a unique invention.
Patent prosecution begins with a unique idea or design. The inventor can then search through databases of accepted, pending, and rejected patents to learn how their idea compares to what is already available. This research stage allows for the inventor to find out if a patent for a similar product already exists. It can also help the inventor discern what distinguishes their product from previous products.
For a patent to be filed and continue to move through the process, it must be drafted with complete, detailed information regarding the invention and claims. A picture of the design is almost always needed. When the draft is ready, it can be submitted to the patent office as an official application.
A patent examiner will start by verifying that the patent application meets all the criteria to be considered for patentability. This can include originality, meeting formalities, and ensuring the claims are patentable. The examiner will then move to prior art research, similar to the inventor’s initial stage. The examiner will thoroughly research all previous patents to ensure the application does not match anything already approved.
The examiner and the applicant may interact throughout the process to better understand the application and advance the prosecution. Finally, the examiner will approve, reject, or object to the patent application. The examiner will provide information on why the decision was made, and provide further feedback on how to move forward and what to amend. This can be in the form of an office action, which requires the applicant to create a response in order to continue moving forward with the application.
Our suite of products helps you through every step of the patent prosecution process.