Your product development initiatives can lose business feasibility due to un-expected licensing-fee expenses or rework on product features. It is prudent to have a thorough search on the vast patent literature to locate potentially offensive patents. The confidence to pursue your product plans are enhanced once you are aware of the type of technology features that are already claimed in patents. GreyB’s iterative approach to exhaustive searching uncovers patent claims that overlap with the technologies, features, and benefits of your new products. Along with documentation of relevant patents, we help in building an electronic database of patent families. This database contains actively maintained and granted patents or patent applications with specific patent offices of interest, written descriptions and claims. The database can be further utilized to perform analysis of the file history to locate the statements that resolves ambiguity in claim language and how the examiner’s rejections & amendments were drawn to overcome art, i.e., file wrapper, estoppel. Such thorough analysis of definitions in specification, dictionaries and technical treatises combined with review of your search subject of FTO helps finding whether there is an identical or equivalent element in your proposed product plans.

As desired, we also extend the FTO search to assist in identifying design around licensing or acquisition candidates. Here our approach to analysis is based on review of the patent landscape coupled with market research.