Searching for prior art is extremely time consuming and can be quite expensive (if you use an outside service). But doing it well is critical to the success of your patent efforts.
If you've retrieved patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office, you know how much time it can take and how little use most of the outputs are. You have to go to the site, drill down to the search page, do your search, get a list of links, click on each link to get the patent text into your browser, copy it, paste it into MS Word, go back and get the images, print each page, one by one ... it's a long list of to-dos just to get a patent in a form you can use.
The Telaric patent retriever/scanner simplifies the process of retrieving patents and patent applications (we will just call them "patents" from now on) from the US Patent & Trademark Office so you save time (and money, if you are using an outside service). Patent text is automatically retrieved into a MS Word document, where you can then use our tool's powerful scanning facility to highlight key words and phrases, allowing you to quickly and efficiently review the patent for relevance. Patent images may be retrieved with a click of a button. The result is a dramatic reduction in the time you spend retrieving and reviewing patents - with a corresponding improvement in the quality of your searches.
It retrieves...
To retrieve patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), you just create a new document using the Telaric patent retriever/scanner Word template and enter the numbers of the patents you want to retrieve (Note: the USPTO has limits on the number of patents you can retrieve per day). You can copy/paste from any source (e.g., USPTO search results, references cited in an existing patent) or just type them in. Our customers often paste in a complete web page of search results, then delete the ones for which they have no interest. Then you click "Retrieve Patents" (a button within a new toolbar), select whether you want just text or images as well, and watch the magic happen. If you selected the just-text option, within minutes, you get a single Word document that includes:
- The original list
- Table of contents with the number, title and LINKS to each patent retrieved
- Complete text of all the requested patents in Word format
In addition, if the "text and images" option is selected, a separate Internet Explorer window is opened containing all of the images in a scrollable format for each requested patent. At your leisure, they can be reviewed, printed or saved (saving as a PDF requires Adobe Acrobat). The result is a dramatic reduction in the time, tedium and expense of retrieving patents and, more importantly, the retrieved patents are in a form you can really use.
And look what we've taken off that to-do list:
- No more surfing and drilling at the USPTO site
- No more getting patents one-at-a-time, with all its attendant back and forth surfing
- No more copy/paste of text from your browser into Word
- No more page-at-a-time viewing/printing of patent images
- No more expensive outside patent retrieval services
It scans...
We've made it a lot easier to get the patents in a useable form, but the real work is just beginning - you now must read through all of the text to determine if the patent is relevant to your search.
If you are a patent attorney or patent litigator, you may have a staff to retrieve documents for you - but it is still up to you to determine their relevance. Before I developed this tool, I tried hard to get efficient at this. I developed some visual scanning techniques and occasionally used the "Find" feature in Word. But it was still a painful and time-consuming process. I knew there must be a better way. So I added a powerful highlighting tool to make visual scanning much more effective. The result was a dramatic timesavings and improvement in the quality of my prior art review.
Starting with the complete text of retrieved patents, you click on "Scan Patent Text" (another button in the new tool bar), which brings up this search window...
... which allows you to enter key words or phrases (up to 20) and specify how you want to highlight the matching text (font size and color, highlight color). Within seconds of the starting the scan, you have a document that is highlighted as you directed. Rather than finding one term at a time (Word's built in method), the complete text is marked up and ready for rapid visual scanning on screen or on paper. This is quite powerful, but it can lose its value when a word or phrase has multiple definitions - causing the tool to highlight terms with meanings unrelated to your topic of interest.
I addressed this by using a feature I had implemented in information management tools I'd designed over the years. For each key word or phrase entered, the tool allows you to enter a second term that, if present within a selected number of words of the first term, further defines the first term (for example, the meaning of "motor" is better understood if the word "electric" is present within 5 words). Then, if the program finds this matched pair, it highlights it and the intervening words. This unique capability is surprisingly valuable as it allows you to be much more specific with your search - and, as a result, much more efficient. And here are the results...
Notice the density and of clustering of terms. If you look closely you'll see the telltale signs of copy and paste of an entire paragraph (the gray highlights which produce the same pattern on each page shown). You can see how well this simple technique leverages our powerful human pattern matching abilities. As users of this tool, we quickly developed our own "sense" for what kinds of search phrases and resulting patterns indicated relevancy and which did not.
Having an entire patent marked up for review offers several benefits:
- Allows the relevance of a patent or patent application to be quickly determined so it can either be discarded or analyzed further
- Enhances thoroughness and thus minimizes the risk of missing important prior art
- Halves the time of your patent review and analysis effort
Summary
The inefficiencies of patent retrieval is why outside retrieval services are in business. But even with patents in hand, the review process can be terribly time consuming. The Telaric patent retriever/scanner solves both problems to speed up and enhance your search for prior art.
Note: You must be using Microsoft Word 2000 or newer (Windows version) and Internet Explorer to use the Telaric patent software.
Speed up and enhance the search for prior art