My Fourth Strategy…

Since i’m constantly thinking about family members, more strategies are coming into my mind.

As i told you about File Wrappers in my last post, don’t forget to look at international search reports.

Most of the times you will find WIPO patents as family members. Use their search reports!! Sometimes they turn out to be very useful…

All of these strategies also applies to family members of the relevant prior art that is being finalized after the search. Since patents related to the relevant prior art may also be relevant to us, who knows we may receive a better prior art.

My third strategy…

My last post about family members reminded me of another strategy where family members can be utilized.

While performing an invalidation search always look for file wrapper of the family members. For example, if the subject patent is filed in US, try to look for its family member which is filed in any other jurisdiction, such as EP.

File wrappers of EP can be studied to find out additional information that may not be exposed to outer world. Or to get leads that may bring us close to a good prior art.

My second strategy…

Make full utilization of family members.

Somtimes they provide very good insights (which i call as internal insights: insights coming from the patent family in question)

Family members can be utilized in various manner.

The first very important use of family members is using their backward and forward citations. Sometimes while doing citation analysis we only check citations of the subject patent as they provide insights on the art that have already been found by the examiner.

Citations of family members are very helpful when a family member was filed after the subject patent. In this case the examiner may find new art that has not been covered under citations of the subject patent.

This is also true when you find a relevant prior art for the subject patent. Do not forget to check family members of the relevant prior art and their citations. Sometimes they may provide a prior art that is more relevant than the one found earlier.

My first strategy…

There are many high quality technical newsletters available across the internet. Some of them are developed by highly skilled people in the domain.

The strategy is:
+ Create an emailID or a feed reader specific to a technology
+ After some time within 6-12 months your email ID will be ready to be used as your own search engine with high quality database.

The advatage of this strategy is that it exposes the things that are not easily searchable (the content of these newsletters doesn’t appear in search engines such as Google). Moreover, these news letters covers information about all the latest technologies and eminent people/scientist/companies that exists in the domain.

Therefore, these newsletters will provide us a way to find out invenors and the companies who are active in a particular technology.

This strategy could be best used for a patentability search.

I would call this as collective intelligence. (using information collected by intelligent people in searching)