Patent wars have become a new corporate battleground. Ongoing litigation cases put patent portfolios under extensive scrutiny and validation testing.
Traditionally, companies manage IPR through in-house docketing systems and outside counsel propagating information from patent offices into in-house platforms. Given portfolio magnitudes, managing significant data from internal and external sources requires substantial human intelligence.
The Patent Misconception: Patents aren't just "papers." Once granted, they require lifecycle management from creation through expiration or sale. Patent information elements—publication date, granted date, claims, inventors, references, maintenance fees—each affect lifetime, quality, valuation, and portfolio aspects.
Large companies manage 100-200K patents worldwide. Impossible to maintain current knowledge through conventional means—in-house attorneys, quality people, docketers, outside counsel.
The Scale Challenge: US companies submit 5,000+ active USPTO cases annually requiring daily monitoring. Documentation between company and USPTO exceeds 5,000 PDFs daily. With 5-10 pages per document, that's 25-50K pages daily. No company can eye-ball and certify this while taking appropriate actions.
The Solution: Define new business approach: treat patents as products. Great companies differentiate by building patent platforms—search platforms doing automated patent searches and document downloads from country patent offices.
Implement business rules based on IPR portfolio valuation, importance, legal events, fee payments. These rules govern IPR data searches. People shift from searching/updating to analytics—competitive intelligence business change.
Data Integrity: Automation removes human errors (typos, wrong dates, wrong edits). Implement Solr search indexing (facets search) for management acceptance of this business model.
Without good quality data, intelligence platforms and management dashboards are useless or dangerous. With intelligent automation, you raise data integrity and focus business decisions on most up-to-date data available.