Maximize Your In-House Patent Team's Potential with These Must-Use Free Resources

Every in-house patent department must work within a budget. But your budget constraints might not require you to do less patenting or less thorough work in preparing, docketing, and prosecuting your applications. Instead, you may just need to find low-cost or free resources that can replace the resources you currently pay for.

Here are some free tools you can use to skill up your in-house patent team.

Free Tools for Accessing Patent-Related Information

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has several free resources for a patent department. The USPTO recently replaced its Public PAIR and Private PAIR systems with a new patent filing and management system. Patent Center provides users with a much better interface that combines patent filing and application management into a single screen.

You can use Patent Center to:

• File new patent applications
• Search for any published patent application
• Access all the transactions that have gone back and forth in your patent filings
• Identify the examiner for your application

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) also has an electronic database called PatentScope for international PCT applications and the nationalizations filed in the various national or regional patent offices from those applications. This database gives you the following:

• Published bibliographic data
• Some prosecution information
• Patent family trees

Many national patent offices, like the Japanese Patent Office, the European Patent Office, the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration, etc., provide online interfaces for their databases. The only challenge is that you might not find information in your preferred language, or the interface might need to be more intuitive.

Free Prior Art Search Tools

Google Patents has a free search engine for prior art searches. The benefit of Google Patents happens when you find a close reference. Then you can instruct the search engine to find similar references to the close reference that you found. This helps you poke around and find additional relevant prior art.

PQAI offers a library of tools to improve patent quality. One of the promising tools in the library is the AI-powered prior art search engine. Its intuitive interface allows users to speed up the prior art search. Moreover, PQAI is a not-for-profit initiative to build an open-source eco-system of AI components to drive innovation and improve patent quality.

Both Google and PQAI have access to a huge number of technical articles besides patents. This is a valuable function because patent office databases may not always be the best places to find relevant prior art. Instead, the relevant art will be in the academic literature.

Tool for Printing Patent Documents

The resources previously mentioned, including Google Patents, PatentScope, and the USPTO, give you the ability to download and print copies of official patent publications. Another resource, Free Patents Online, also gives you a free PDF version of patents and published patent applications.

Tool for Legal Research on Patent Law Issues

Google has good coverage of legal articles and blogs about most of the topics you might need to research. Law firms, vendors, and stakeholder groups publish articles all the time about legal and procedural hurdles you might run into, and you can find most of that online.

Another good resource is the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP). This is the official manual used by U.S. patent examiners when working on patent filings. The benefit of using the MPEP is that it gives you both the stock paragraphs they use and the elements they need to meet to apply those paragraphs.

Reading through the MPEP can give you both procedural direction and legal arguments to use when you receive an office action rejection. The MPEP has a good index, and once you identify the issue you are dealing with, the MPEP gives you insight into what the examiner thought as they assembled your office action. It may even tell you how to answer the rejection.

Tool for Innovation Capture and Patent Mining

The TIP Tool by Triangle IP offers a method to streamline your patent mining process, seamlessly integrating into your workflow pipeline to capture innovation enterprise-wide and track down the applications throughout the drafting and filing stages.

The free version also scrapes public data from the patent office. Thus the tool allows you to gather important information for published cases without using the USPTO’s Patent Center tool.

The TIP Tool also offers informative dashboards to keep a tab on patent case health, idea and patent pipelines, the performance of innovators, and more. It also offers a free patent family tree generator.

Adding Free Resources Into Your In-House Patent Team’s Toolbox

The free and freemium versions of these tools will work for most in-house patent departments. Between the national patent office databases, free search engines, legal resources, and patent mining systems, your in-house patent team will have powerful tools to accomplish most of its tasks.

But if you have a vast and complex patent portfolio or handle your filing and prosecution in-house, you might need a docketing system with more features. Usually, huge enterprises will need such proprietary resources. Otherwise, docketing software solutions are overkill for small to medium-sized enterprises.