Patent Search Services

A patentability search attempts to estimate the scope of patent protection the Patent Office will grant for an invention. The broad concept may be patentable if the prior art does not show invention's generic concept. On the other hand, if there are numerous prior art references similar to the invention, then limited patent protection may be possible. The search attempts to uncover the most relevant references. However, there can be many different purposes behind a patent search and these differences lead to difference in approach that needs to be followed for each kind of search. These different types of searches are mentioned below.

Novelty & Patentability Search

Novelty Searches/ Patentability Searches are conducted to determine if a particular invention meets the patentability criteria in terms of novelty and non-obviousness/inventive step. Such Prior Art Searches are, generally, conducted before incurring any cost into patent drafting, patent filing and prosecution of a patent encompassing any invention. Such patentability searches at the onset are also helpful in evaluating all the potential applications, commercial potential, market size and competition, etc.

Novocus Legal, a patinformatics firm from India, has vast experience of helping clients with highly cost effective Patentability Searches. Based on this vast experience with patent searches, Novocus Legal has been able to synchronise its patent searching with cost optimization in order to provide high quality pre filing searches at an extremely low budget.

Invalidity/opposition

A Patent Validity Search or Patent Invalidity Search is an exhaustive Prior Art Search conducted after patent issuance. The purpose of the search is either to validate the enforceability of a patent's claims or to invalidate one or more claims of a patent, respectively. These two searches are identical except for the desired outcome (valid or invalid patent claims) of the search.

This search report is first line of defence in patent infringement suits. In this era of knowledge driven commercialization of products and services, it is very important to conduct a Validity Prior Art Search before Asserting, Licensing, Buying, or Selling a Patent.

Novocus Legal follows an innovative and scientific research based approach for invalidity searches. Novocus Legal employs appropriate query expansion methods for improving recall effectiveness and efficiency. One of our query expansion methods includes technical cluster based information retrieval. Cluster-based retrieval assumes that clusters would provide additional evidence to match user's information need. Since cluster-based retrieval approaches have relied on automatically-created clusters, professionals at Novocus Legal use technical clusters approach along with highly accurate technical field based approach for invalidity searches, so as to make our reports highly reliable and accurate in nature.

Freedom-to-operate

It is quite common for an organization to want to adopt some technology offered or used by some other organization or to design its own copy of a piece of equipment which is offered commercially at a price which greatly exceeds the cost of manufacture. Usually there will be some uncertainty as to whether some legal protection of the item exists which could result in legal action.

It is also quite common for an organization to want to access right to use for their own patents. This phenomena is of paramount importance since most of the patents suffer from other blocking patents these days. Usually there will be some uncertainty as to whether some patent hurdle exists in way of practicing our own invention which could result in legal action.

This phenomena is most significant in biotechnology based industries, where protein refolding may lead to a new patent but often blocks its freedom to operate. Also, it is or paramount importance to realise which of competitor patents covering protein refolding have expired or are about to expire. Same instances can be found in technical fields of microarrays, biosensors, nanotechnology, biomedical devices, and micro-electromechanical systems. This task required highly skilled professionals who have a thorough understanding of these structures as well as entire patent system.

Novocus Legal has a team of highly skilled and technically advanced professionals for working in these complex interdisciplinary domains. We follow procedures that are based on recent scientific research and we keep updating our processes with each passing day for achieving further improvement in our excellent work quality.

State of art Analysis

Information and meta-information related to national and international patents is a critical asset for every innovative company. The complexity of managing, searching, analysing and relating such information to the needs of the company, in the different user tasks, is tackled by innovative analysis of state of art in a particular technical field, that aim at supporting the users in such daunting tasks. Also, state of art is also important in realising future potential in a technology and access future growth potential in a particular technical domain. This leads to an indispensable need for scientometric based assessment of intellectual assets of an organization vis-a-vis entire intellectual canvas of entire technical domain.

Patent state of art search is concerned with finding all filed patents relevant to a given patent application. Novocus Legal presents a state of art report that maps difference between standing of clients intellectual assets and technical advancements in that particular technical domain. We use highly sophisticated and scientifically advanced information retrieval (IR) techniques which try to model the steps taken by a patent examiner in patent search.

Also, it is well established and illustrated that the comprehensiveness and the quality of a given search report may vary significantly as a function of the patent office drawing up the report. These differences imply consequences with respect to the safe use and interpretation of the data. The professionals at Novocus Legal stress and abide by fact that a sound analysis based on patent citation data can only be performed in a meaningful way if the analyst has a good knowledge of the underlying search reports.

As the strategic importance of understanding changes in technology for successful business of most firm's increases, the ability to analyze and monitor the current stage and history of technology is reckoned as a critical asset both for gaining competitive advantage and identifying promising niches. Patent citation networks have been widely used for systematic and empirical analysis of technology development. Understanding of technology's detailed changes in large patent citation networks, however, is difficult to achieve because of these networks' large and complex structures. To overcome this problem, Novocus Legal has developed an algorithm that identifies patent development paths from a large patent citation network by evaluating the weight of citations between patents. Use of this algorithm reduces time and effort required for citation indexing and provide access to a plethora of knowledge that can result from proper citation indexing.

Sequence/strucuture

With recent advances in biotech research tools, the use of biosequence/biostructure information has greatly facilitated the R&D process in the pharmaceutical and other life sciences industries. However, substantial challenges in the management of biosequence related intellectual property are very well documented and well known to experts. Also, due to the dramatic increase in the amount of sequence data, the nature of claims on sequences as well as limitations in available database resources for sequence analysis and searches has generated a need to establish biosequencing searching as a separate task, which requires highly skilled and experiences professionals.

Nucleic acid and protein sequence data from patent publications is available from a plurality of commercial and public sources. But, in order to derive intelligence from that data, highly skilled human resource base is mandatory. Novocus Legal is a firm focused on life sciences and specialises in analyses of these inter-disciplinary fields.