XPAT Patent Monitoring and Workflows
Patent monitoring as permanent monitoring of patents
In XPAT, the driving engines of patent monitoring are automatically running search profiles that search patent databases worldwide week by week and transfer interesting and important documents into the company’s own database without additional work by the user.
This monitoring therefore runs largely without further manual effort and supplies the XPAT database every week with new documents from the fields defined by the search profiles. In this way, the company receives only documents that have at least a minimum relevance to its activities.
Checking patents – patent circulation
Every company has highly qualified engineers who review patent documents for their technical content. Relevant documents can form the basis for many business and strategic decisions.
For example: Does protected third-party technology hinder the company’s planned developments? Is Freedom to Operate (FTO) ensured? Are there documents containing similar or potentially infringing information in comparison with the company’s own intellectual property rights?
It is also often overlooked that third-party ideas can provide suggestions that support or promote a company’s own inventions. Such patent circulation processes can be carried out automatically in XPAT.
Workflows
Internal search profiles access newly received documents. Documents matching a profile are automatically stored in a worklist for the designated recipients.
In XPAT, this is controlled through clear structures and automated processes. Relevant information is distributed in a targeted manner without anyone having to monitor every individual step continuously.
The documents are assessed by the responsible experts, and all users can benefit from the resulting additional in-house information.
Competitor analysis
XPAT is particularly suitable for technology monitoring and competitor analysis. Statistical evaluations can show which competitors are active in which technological fields.
This completes the comprehensive XPAT workflow:
- External search profiles as the starting point for patent monitoring
- Targeted distribution of relevant documents within a definable workflow
- Feedback of evaluated documents to the patent department
Legal status changes of patents and changes in competitors’ patent families
Patent monitoring identifies critical or otherwise relevant documents from the company’s business and technological environment.
It may already become apparent that applications which are currently harmless because they do not yet have protective effect could become disruptive once they are granted. This makes it possible to begin collecting opposition material at an early stage and to prepare for a possible future case.
To ensure that the point in time at which a document acquires legal force and protective effect as a granted patent—or loses that effect, for example through non-payment of fees—is not missed, XPAT provides automatic legal-status monitoring.
Relevant intellectual property rights can be marked for legal-status monitoring and are then regularly checked by the XPAT system for changes.