Patentability searches are conducted prior to preparing and filing a patent application. Such a search is not required. However, it is useful in assessing whether your invention could be patented before you invest the money required to prepare and file the application. More importantly, a patentability search is useful in assessing the breadth of rights you can expect from any resulting patent. Some inventions, while patentable, are so easily modified to avoid infringing the patent, that there is little likelihood your investment in obtaining patent protection will be recovered from the resulting patent monopoly. Thus, a patentability search is often useful in making a business decision relative to investing in a patent application.

The cost of a patentability search depends upon the complexity of your invention. For a specific cost estimate, contact us at info@iph2.com.

Clearance searches (which are also known as "Right to Use" searches) are useful to determine if a product that you wish to sell infringes an existing and unexpired patent. A clearance search involves first identifying relevant, unexpired patents and then requires an analysis of the claims of those patents to determine whether they anticipate your proposed product. Sometimes it is also worth conducting a validity search to further probe the risk raised by a patent identified in a clearance search.

The cost of a clearance search is usually higher than a patentability search because of the need to understand your product and its market and then analyze the meaning of the claims of any relevant patents identified by the search. For a specific cost estimate, contact us at info@iph2.com.

Validity searches are undertaken to determine if certain identified claims of an unexpired patent are in fact valid. Often such searches are undertaken if a clearance search confirms that your proposed product may infringe an unexpired patent. The object of a validity search is to find prior art documents that were not known to the United States Patent Examiner who approved issuing the patent of concern and that may render at least certain claims of the patent invalid.

In assessing the validity of a patent, not only must we understand your product and its market, we must completely understand the meaning of each term in the patent of concern. To do so, we must study the entire prosecution history of that patent and then scour the patent offices of the world (and often other resources such as text books and trade journals) to try to identify invalidating prior art.

The cost of a validity search is usually quite high, and it is difficult to provide a firm cost estimate for a validity search since facts that are found during the course of the search very often expand the searching and the consideration that is needed. We would be pleased to discuss our validity searching abilities further. Please contact us at info@iph2.com.