Patent Data Application – Series I

Law Practice planning through patent data analysis

This new series aims to find possible role of patents in decision support and business development. In this post, I am trying to list some possible applications of patent data in business planning for small and medium sized law firms.

Law firms are like any commercial entity which need cash, clients, Intangible assets, competitive edge and right business planning to stay profitable. Patent data are wealth of information that could be leveraged to find invisibles and data for strategic decision. 

In my view, the patent data can be used for:

Business Planning:

Practice location planning: Many PTOs around the world provide bibliographic data which could be used to map inventor, assignee, technology area, etc. A law firm expanding their practice and planning new offices in a country could use these data to plan offices, resources, and predict financial benefits based on past filings.

Resource Planning: Patents are indicators of technological advancements. An emerging law firm may want to plan its resource based on market demands and technological advancements in certain geographic region. A patent based trend analysis can provide interesting insights towards legal and technical resource requirements in foreseeable future.

Business Development:

Targeting New Clients: Patent data could give valuable insights about target companies. It may help the BD officers to target right in-house attorneys, assess technical areas of filings, profile target company, etc.

Finding Share of Wallet: Data analysis could help medium sized law firms in analyzing whether the top clients are using competitor law firms for their filings. This could help in gauging effectiveness of service, client loyalty, and possible business negotiation areas.

Building new partnerships: Companies file patents at various geographies. Patent data could help small and medium sized law firms find possible overseas partners who can cross refer each other in case of patent family extensions. This analysis could be done looking at various angles.

Competitive Benchmarking & Intelligence

Benchmarking Pendency: This analysis could help a law firm in making a better business pitch. A law firm with lower pendency may help in winning more accounts. Also, this analysis could be extended to see if patent filed by competition have seen significant change in claims during prosecution.

Claim Strength analysis: A semi-automated analysis to benchmark competition on claim strength.  There are various proven scoring mechanisms that could also be used to make better business case.

Resource mapping: Various countries allow law firms to put information about their practice areas and resources or various patent offices provide attorney data. This data could valuable source of information in order to map resources and law firms. This analysis is best done when complemented with primary and secondary research data.

Effective Prosecution:

Examiner relationship network: Law firms can conduct examiner relationship network to understand how examiners world together in various technology areas. Also, a technology specific network may also provide leads to HR department.

Technology area and type of rejections: A law firm specializing in niche areas or emerging technology areas may want to understand common prosecution hurdles. This may help them in better planning while drafting applications. This analysis could be combined with examiner analysis to identify any pattern.

Patent application scoring: Law firms handling clients with large volume of pending application can use proven techniques to prioritize efforts. The scoring can be done on various parameters.

Challenges:

Underlying Data: The above mentioned analyses are data intensive and require correct data for any meaningful result.

Automation: Based on my experiences with PTO data, I think data provided by patent offices around the world require lot of normalization. They are in no way ready to use for such data intensive analysis. Automation is essential for such analysis. Automation can be used for range of activities such as pulling right data from websites, normalizing & cleaning crude data.

Data handling: These analyses may involve data which may run in hundreds of thousands of records. These analyses also require correct understanding of the data. A single data handling mistake can change the face of entire analysis.

Risk of misinterpretation: “Little knowledge could be dangerous” this is true for these kinds of analysis. The end user and analyst must question the output and check the sanity of the results.

Conclusion:

These are only some ideas on patents and its application in this context. These are based on my experiences and similar consulting projects.  There could be other numerous applications of patent data that could help law firms.

These analyses are certainly worth spending time and money. These analyses could help a law firm in not only expanding its practice but also for regular health check. However, with a caveat that external factor should be considered while taking any action. These analyses can provide actionable intelligence but cannot replace human judgment and creativity.