Software Patent Law | Patents4Software.com

On June 11, we presented the fifth episode of the Patent Analytics webinar series. Suneel Arora, Tyler Nasiedlak and Mark Stignani joined me. This episode covered, “Best Practices for Developing Reliable Freedom-to-Operate Landscapes and Advanced Techniques for Interactive, Reusable FTO Mapping.”

One of the most dreaded tasks for any product development team is navigating a complex patent landscape in order to achieve an infringement-free product design. We discussed best practices for patent counsel to work with product development teams to perform the key tasks of an FTO project, and also demonstrated how interactive claim maps make navigation of an FTO landscape fast and effective.

Key takeaways from this episode included:

• FTOs involve multi-sourced, highly nuanced data
• Detailed human analysis is required
• You should resolve data inconsistencies by hand
• Claims are key
• Commercial FTO mappings require review

  The webinar recording (and slides) are available online, if you missed it. You can find them at:

  https://www.slwip.com/resources/episode-05-best-practices-for-developing-reliable-freedom-to-operate-landscapes-and-advanced-techniques-for-interactive-reusable-fto-mapping/

We just completed Episode 4 of our patent analytics webinar series.  In this webinar we explored the use of examiner analytics to assist in making prosecution decisions.  Some of the takeaways were:

1. Many examiner analytics are driven more by case assignment and art unit influences than the examiner.
2. Analytics are helpful to ballpark the likelihood of success of any random application filed in an art unit, but are not capable of predicting how any one case is going to treated.
3. It can be difficult to differentiate between statistics that are driven by supervisory control vs an individual examiner, or driven by PTO policy or law, and thus cannot be ascribed to any one examiner.
4. Good use cases are making decisions on whether to file an RCE or appeal, and educating a client on the overall probabilities of getting a case allowed, the usefulness of an interview, and other such things.
5. Another use case is to identify outlier examiners that may be particularly difficult to gain an allowance from.

For the full webinar, you can find it here:

Episode 04: Using Examiner Analytics to Improve Prosecution Efficiency and Develop Well-informed, Data-Driven Prosecution Decisions and Strategy