LexisNexis will today (23 February) announce that a significant amount of its PatentAdvisor examiner insights are now freely available through a web browser extension directly on the United States Patent and Trademark Office websites, with deeper dive metrics subject to a fee after 30 days.
PatentAdvisor provides metrics on patent examiner behaviour, in particular how likely or unlikely they are to grant a patent application. Users can look up examiners by name or application number, and most of the people that use the tool are patent attorneys either in law firms or corporate patent departments.
Until now, PatentAdvisor was a website that people needed to subscribe to, but speaking to Legal IT Insider, Amit Alagh, senior product marketing manager for LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions said: “We have found that people have tool fatigue. Everything is a website and requires you to log in. So what we did is create this new extension – a pair extension – so our customers can access PatentAdvisor through the patent office websites.”
Most of LexisNexis’ IP customers access the patent office website on a daily basis and Alagh said: “Now if you instal our browser extension, it overlays our metrics onto the website and can show you where this examiner falls as far as their performance in that unit.”
Performance is visualised in red, amber and green to indicate the number of patent applications allowed by a particular examiner. Alagh said: “If its red that means stop and look. Examiners in that zone cost money and take time to get past.”
According to Alagh and Ken Gemmill, business operations manager for LexisNexis IP, Lexis is trying to level the playing field and the core stats will continue to be available free to all. That includes allowance rates; average number of actions to allowance; examiner time allocation; art unit allowance rate; and art unit average office actions to allowance (showing how an examiner compares with a unit average.)
Deeper dives will be subject to a fee after 30 days. Those include appeal metrics and users can, for example, click directly into a case and take a look at the judge’s decision and the methodology.
You don’t get to choose a patent examiner, but these statistics can help law firms clients decide whether or not to proceed with an application, and what is likely to be involved, including in terms of costs.
Existing customers have already been given access to the extension and Gemmill said: “We’ve seen exponential growth – someone who was accessing our website 10x a month is now making 150 calls to the API and it’s been growing in leaps and bounds with existing customers.”
He adds: “There are so many single-lawyer patent law firms across the United States and it’s interesting that they aren’t always working for small clients; sometimes they have large Fortune 100 clients and are very specialised. On the corporate side you have the large companies with the sophisticated patent departments but also mid-sized companies that don’t – they aren’t in the patent business but are doing it because they need to along the way. This tool levels the playing field whether you are big or small law.”