Well! with the surging technological rivalries between the companies these days, one has to make an emergency call to be ahead in the field of technology and thus “patent”. Today’s companies know the formula of market dominancy is by getting the patents, and not letting anyone use it without authorization. Patent Litigation has just become the game for companies as it offers huge financial rewards when the coin flips in the favor of the patent holder. Contrary, it can cause severe monetary and reputational damage if the patent got invalidated in the court. For this, the petitioner/plaintiff must know their patent’s strength. The patent strength should also be checked before “Patent Licensing Deals”. [As food for knowledge – on average, US court faces 5000-6000 litigation cases every year]
Being from the intellectual property family, generally, in high-profile litigation cases, we do come across many times where identifying a prior-art bang-on is challenging even after performing many rounds of searches. As rightly said, it’s better to leave the legal game to the legal professionals, and this is where we come from. Our masters and PhDs from specific technical background knows the 0’s and 1’s of patent and holds a remarkable footmark in solving such challenging cases by strategizing an “invalidation search”. The invalidation search is performed to find a perfect prior art e.g., patent literature, non-patent literature, videos, images, etc., that could kill the patent.
We believe, the good prior art is an outcome of good search queries that we form for different databases. or, what you type what you get, and it’s true. Being experts in using different databases, we make different combinational search queries that include keyword-based, class-based, assignee/inverter-based, keyword & class combination, assignee & class combination, inventor & class, and semantic search – the list is long. And the similar process is followed for non-patent searches too. As different databases have different working algorithms, they may give a different quality of prior arts with the same search query. Thus, using multiple databases for searching is always an added advantage. And this step keeps running on an endless loop for finding a bang-on prior art until we get one.
Prior-art searching is a matter of patience and an extent up to which one can go to get success. As a patent strategist, I must assure you that we still have the option to find the closest prior art when the above-mentioned strategies fail.
