In the second part of our two part blog post series at IP Watchdog, we document our efforts to develop, and refine, a patent ranking system based on our unique database tracking over $7B of patents that companies are trying to sell, or have sold.

How do you find the highest quality patents reliably and efficiently? We share our methodology and have made the code and model available under a Creative Commons license.

We’ve identified five primary factors for consideration in patent ranking. In this article, we'll analyze how independent claim count, claim 1 word count, and family size & international filings can help to eliminate less useful patents quickly and efficiently.

“We would like you to find the best patents in this pile of 50,000 candidates. Oh, and we need it done for $30K.” We hear requests like this so often we’ve built processes and tools to help us address them.

When analyzing a large patent portfolio it is often difficult to determine where to spend diligence dollars first. In order to direct us to the specific assets that are more likely to be interesting we developed an in house heuristic ranking system. It is based on static patent characteristics.