Over the past 18 months, our clients have begun to show greater interest in international patents (e.g. non-US). Increasing client interest in international patents corresponds with the general rise in importance of international patents (continuing ascension of the Chinese market, potential for unitary patent for Europe), more anti-patent owner decisions in the US, and greater patent litigation outside the US. Client interest spurred us to review our existing patent evaluation tools and methodologies for potential improvements.

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.

“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.