Patent Analysis and Research

What it does

This supports the analytical core of patent advice. We take a patent, a technology or a legal question, work through European Patent Office data and relevant case law, and produce a structured working analysis. A European patent attorney then reviews it, corrects it and turns it into advice.

The goal is to shorten the mechanical part of the work, which is finding, sorting and reading, so attorney time goes to judgement: what a claim covers, whether it would survive a challenge, and what that means for your product or your filing.

It handles patent documents from European Patent Office data and legal questions on EPO and UPC case law. It doesn't draft or file applications and it doesn't decide anything: the output is a working analysis for an attorney.

Functions

Third-party patent analysis

You give us a patent or application number, or a set of them. We pull the bibliographic data, claims, description and legal status from EPO data and lay out the claims in a structured form, with independent and dependent claims separated and their features split out.

You get a claim chart and a first reading of what each claim covers. The attorney checks the construction against the description and the rules of interpretation in Article 69 EPC.

Validity review

You give us the patent, and the prior art you or we have found against it. We map claim features to passages in the cited documents and flag where a feature appears to be disclosed, where it isn't, and where it's ambiguous.

You get a feature-by-feature comparison that supports a view on novelty and inventive step. The attorney decides whether an argument holds up. This is the working basis for opposition, revocation or defence strategies.

Freedom-to-operate analysis

You give us a description of your product or process, the countries of interest and the candidate patents. We compare your product features with the claims of each candidate and take legal status into account, so patents that have lapsed or were never validated in the relevant country are set aside.

For each patent you get a reasoned note on whether the product falls within the claims, with the worrying claims highlighted. The attorney assigns the risk level and recommends action. Method and legal test are described in freedom-to-operate analysis.

Case-law-grounded research

You give us a legal or procedural question, for example on claim interpretation or on a procedural point before the Unified Patent Court.

You get a draft answer grounded in decisions of the EPO and the UPC, with citations to the decisions relied on. Each citation is checked against the source before the answer is used, and a lawyer decides what weight it carries. For the court itself, see the Unified Patent Court.

Prior art support

You give us the invention as described by an inventor or in a draft application.

You get a ranked set of candidate documents from EPO data, which the attorney reads and sorts into relevant and irrelevant. It supports the process described in prior art and how to search for it, and it doesn't replace the search strategy an attorney sets.

What you receive

• Claim charts and structured claim readings.
• Feature-by-feature comparisons for validity or freedom-to-operate questions.
• A research memo with checked citations to EPO and UPC decisions.
• A list of the documents considered, so you can see what the conclusion rests on.

An attorney reviews everything you receive. A search of published documents is never exhaustive, and every report states its scope and limits. Confidential content is redacted on our own hardware before any cloud AI sees it; if that check cannot run, nothing goes out. Our platform is hosted in the EU.

Where it is used

It supports 360° patent strategy, where the analysis informs what to claim and where to file, and patent research, where it delivers patentability, validity and freedom-to-operate answers. We also use it when we screen a company for inventions it hasn't protected yet, as described in finding the IP you already have. For ongoing coverage of a field, it works together with our patent watch.

A walk-through: a client asks whether it can launch a new valve in Germany and France. We enter the product features and countries. We retrieve candidate patents, drop those that aren't in force there and lay out the claims of the rest. For each remaining patent we compare product features with the claims. The attorney reads the claim charts, rejects two false positives, requests a validity comparison for one patent and then writes the opinion. The report lists the documents considered and states what the research didn't cover.