‘What should I do differently today if more and more IP departments are digitizing every process and preparing themselves for the future. Should I also try few advanced tools? If so, which one would suit my requirements best?’ – Have these thoughts crossed your mind recently?
These thoughts had been making Sam, senior counsel at a Fortune 500 organization, anxious for a while now. Looking at the trends and case studies of counsels getting stark returns by adopting legal tech, he was wondering if it was time he joined the wagon.
Legal Tech, once claimed to be in the early adoption stage according to a Law Society 2019 report, has witnessed huge growth post-onset of COVID-19. After all, your internal clients are looking for “quick, sound information, hard data, and impartial advice”.
But it’s not easy. As Financial times best put it – Choosing the right legal tech is “the tyranny of choice” for counsels and firms.
“One of our biggest challenges has been finding the right tools for our lawyers and for our business users.”
– Karen Lockhart, Director of Business and Practice systems, Baker Botts.
1719 companies are working on legal tech (according to a list compiled by Stanford). So how do you choose the right legal technology companies for your need among such a humongous list?
To help you, we compiled a list of 12 emerging legal technology companies, especially in IP, offering solutions you’d wanna try your hands on.
These tools can help you with DIY clearance searches, petition filing, IDS management, and whatnot.
Given that AI and ML technologies are vastly impacting all facets of our lives, it’s time we adopt legal technology and realign our work methods based on redefined client expectations.
Here are the best legal technology companies and their tools can best serve your IP needs.
Petition.ai
The tool uses the publicly available patent petition documents filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to help improve the efficiency and results of prosecuting patent applications.
These documents include petitions, requests for reconsideration, and most importantly, petition decisions.
The searchable database includes ~500,000 documents from 200,000 patent applications filed since 2013.
Now imagine going through all this data manually. Phew!
If you are a patent attorney or a patent agent, you can efficiently search through these documents to readily find the ones with similar issues and/or spot patterns.
This would help you quickly and easily craft a petition with an increased likelihood of being granted on the very first attempt, thereby avoiding the need to request reconsideration of denial or dismissal (and saving your and your client’s time and money ).
Check out the details of their product by clicking here.
Cintian
Cintian offers an AI-Based patent clearance search tool. This tool can help R&D departments and inventors establish the novelty of their invention, before commencing the costly process of drafting and filing a patent application. The tool cross-references inventions with millions of existing patents at once, eliminating the need for costly manual patent searching, and boosting the time to market.
Whether you are an IP counsel or an inventor, applying AI methods to patent data sets can provide you faster and more accurate insights. Thus, reducing the cost of overcoming inventive and legal hurdles, and enabling you to focus on R&D and commercial exploitation of the ideas with certainty.
Have a clearance search you wanted to be done for a while now? Head over to Cintian’s website by clicking here.
Patent Monitor
Patent Monitor is an intelligent patent analysis software by Averbis. The tool allows you to automatically classify large quantities of patents into user-specific brackets and assess their significance for you and your company.
Based on artificial intelligence, the software learns and acquires the know-how from you as an IP professional. Compared to conventional rule-based approaches, the tool performs with up to 400% more accuracy. At the same time, the application reduces the manual effort for identifying relevant documents by up to 90%.
Here are some of the day to day tasks that the application automates –
- Classifying patent and non-patent literature (NPL) in your category system
- Carrying out patent landscape analyses
- Executing competitive analyses quickly and simply
- Identifying new trends and technologies
- Improving prior art searches
- Sending relevant patents to the responsible department or your customers
IPRally
With the latest machine learning technologies, IPRally is a virtual patent agent learning from real-world professionals like you.
The premium tool uses a graphing approach. This means the tool re-arranges all the technical information in natural language documents into tree-like structures.
Why is that done? – you ask.
Because these data structures can be efficiently comprehended by trained AI algorithms and at the same time are intuitive for a human reader.
The IPRally engine contains three basic elements:
- A graph-based data model that represents how patent attorneys and examiners perceive things when drafting or examining patent applications,
- The prosecution history of earlier patent applications, and
- A cutting edge neural network that learns the patenting logic using the above two elements.
They claim their search engine to be the only one that utilizes real patent examination data to train the AI to find the most relevant results.
While their other tools are premium, they have a free prior art search tool whose working we have depicted below:
a. Insert the subject patent number.
b. Proceed by filling in your email ID.
c. Get the results in your inbox.
Intrigued and want to get your hands dirty? You can try this tool here.
LEAP
LEAP’s AI and ML-based algorithms allow you to classify patents and applications based on technology metrics and trends. Their goal is to help you build a strong(er) patent portfolio with effective monetization.
They have three different tools, each with its own unique functionality.
a. LARA (Leap Automated Response Assistant)
LARA is an AI assistant that can help perform a contextual search when you wish to perform a prior art search. The tool is programmed such that it is ready to file a response draft in the Office Action response template.
b) Auto-IDS
Auto-IDS is a fully automated US IDS function that auto schedules IDS triggers, auto-generates patent family and extracts references and provides filled EFS-ready IDS forms.
Now for a busy professional like you, ain’t that a dream come true?
Editor’s note: There are times when off the peg tools don’t work, and you’d want to get your hands on custom tools, personalized to your needs. If you’re looking for a custom-made IDS manager tool, designed based on your needs, this is where you should head next – How we design the perfect IDS manager tailored to your needs?
c. Insights
Their actionable prosecution intelligence tool gives you the power to design an IP strategy with greater efficiency. The GIF below gives a brief picture. How can they help meet your needs? For answers and more info, click here.
GrowPath (For law firms)
GrowPath is cloud-based case management and client intake software solution designed for attorneys and paralegals in midsize and large legal firms.
Its features include document management, matter trackers, market measurement tools, and more.
If you are an attorney or a paralegal, here’s what GrowPath can do for you.
- Contact clients, adjusters, and other case stakeholders via text, email, or voice call.
- Share details and documents with them.
- The solution includes case headers, event timelines, and user behavior analytics that’ll help you keep track of your firms’ workflow.
- It also features AI-powered ‘buzzword’ technology that helps users identify terms and phrases to discover opportunities.
Additionally, GrowPath features custom reporting capabilities, military-grade encryption for communications regarding different cases, and a marketing analytics module that allows users to measure the ROI of different marketing initiatives.
GrowPath offers a wide range of software for an attorney’s daily assistance, to the point that you’d wanna marry it. Together this software will be to you what Donna is to Harvey!
Wanna take a little tour? Click here.
IP Toolworks
Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, the legal software company provides software that assists in patent prosecution.
Their targeted algorithms work at the backend to provide responses that precisely match your rejection. This means no more starting from the scratch. Instead, it can help you write responses quickly and confidently drawing upon the latest best practices.
Their software Arguminer can help you negotiate more effectively. It first taps into the insight of thousands of other rejections and analyzes them. After that, it identifies precisely what has succeeded in situations like yours. All you have to do is follow these steps–
a. Drag and drop the rejection document.
b. Find the number of cases similar to yours.
c. Scroll through these cases and analyze the response in each of them.
d. Come up with an effective data-backed response for your rejection. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy!
The idea of inventing a patent drafting software can be predicted to be into existence before the 2000s but wasn’t made into practice until recently.
Interesting AF: Here’s a patent filed on the patent automation system in the 2000s.
Next, we have listed a few emerging companies that are finding ways to help attorneys in drafting patents, and thus taking away the tedious and mundane tasks that eat up a significant amount of your time.
Rowan
One-third of the top 30 AmLaw 200 patent firms are already embracing Rowan’s technology. The end-to-end platform provides invention disclosure, drafting, prosecution, and portfolio monitoring solutions.
Their patent drafting tools can bring efficiency to your firm by taking care of tedious editing and formatting tasks. So you can focus on the things your corporate client’s value – describing the inventive concept and drafting patent applications that have a better chance of being granted.
Triangle IP
The TIP Tool is designed to provide a comprehensible way of capturing, tracking, and managing your innovation without friction.
The best part – you don’t need to be a patent expert to use this tool. The user-friendly interface can help you manage the process through capture, vetting, drafting, and filing stages.
Wanna take a sneak peek? Click here.
FENIX.AI
Wanna use AI to provide the most cost-effective patent preparation services? Well, FENIX is the place!
Their tool separates the process of drafting the claims from preparing the rest of the technical content. In addition, both of these processes can be performed in a way that enables them to be easily reconciled and entered into a patent automation system. Once all the pieces are in place, the draft documents are spit out and the final product is filled out in a few places and polished all over so that it reads like a cohesive document.
Cognition IP
Cognition IP is an AI-powered patent law firm that can efficiently help you create and file patents and deal with other kinds of patent law.
Instead of relying on the endless man-hours for lawyers trying to figure out if a patent is already out there, Cognition IP leans on algorithms (Y combinator) to create a kind of topic graph around a subject and see if anyone’s filed something on it already.
What’s unique here is that unlike others that cost by the hour, Cognition IP has a fixed fee system. So you can budget your legal spending accordingly.
GreyB Services
While the above companies offer ready-made solutions, there are situations where you need to modify your existing software according to your internal processes. GreyB can help you there. You can explore some of the previous systems here as an example:
a. SLATE
There are a few situations where we wish to do more but withing the same IP budget?
SLATE was custom but to allow categorization of patents and quickly help you find a set of 10 relevant patents overlapping your product from a crowd of hundreds. It can run clearance searches at ultra-fast speed. In addition, it highlights already reviewed patent documents, cutting the data noise, and lets you collaborate in real-time with in-house as well as outsourced teams while showcasing all the progress in one place.
With different levels of reviews, advanced filters, and all the conversations going in one place, you’ll be inside a collaborative ecosystem. One that is far ahead of the old-school excel sheets and email methods.
Wanna give it a try? Get a demo.
b. BOS (Business Opportunity for Sales)
The tool provides a central repository of your patents/pending applications that have prevented other assignees from getting a grant on their pending applications. Some clients wanted to have such a system integrated into their internal tools. As the name suggests, it lists all of the blocked assignees so you can plan on non-aggressive patent monetization strategies.
To put BOS through its paces, we used the tool to analyze the 52 US assets that Samsung recently acquired from Nokia to find out how this acquisition can affect other companies?
As a result, we found that assets of a large set of companies (~80) seem to be blocked by the patents which are just acquired by Samsung. Some of the interesting names that came up include LG, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Google, ZTE, Sony, Apple, and even Samsung itself!
If you’d like to read more insights we found, jump to read the full analysis here.
Intrigued much? Explore BOS here.
c. FIT (Filing Impediment Tracker)
FIT helps you clear the rejection-response loop that clogs your prosecution pipeline by finding the stuck applications. In other words, it gives you better clarity of the pending application portfolio and offers strategies to make your prosecution process fast and smooth sailing. Check more on it here.
d. IDS Manager
We gave you a brief glimpse of our IDS Manager above, which can effectively manage IDS for your portfolio. Here are some of the functionalities of our tool.
The tool efficiently tracks references, gives timely alerts for the applications for which IDS have not been filed, automates the bibliographic details and PDF of references download to be submitted with the IDS, and automatically retrieves the English counterparts for the non-English references.
What more, this tool can be customized to your organization’s needs? How can that be done? Get in touch and our team will take you through the details. Click here to Know more.
Conclusion
That ends our list of companies making interesting tools to make your IP department smooth going.
Do you think we missed including someone interesting? Let us know in the comment section to make sure we add them to the list.
Note: This is in continuation to our legal tech articles series where we discussed What is Legal Tech and Where does it fit in your operations as a counsel by answering 12 frequently asked questions? And, the Benefits of Legal Tech.
For more interesting legal tech-related content, subscribe to our blog.
Authored by: Nidhi, Market Research.
