Patent Search

A patent search is very important because the results of the patent search may decide whether you want to go ahead with your invention.

If you knew you couldn’t get any patent protection at all, would you want to go ahead with product development and trying to launch your product? For many inventors, the answer would be no. That’s why we do a patent search first- to try to get feedback right from the get-go, as to whether your invention concept is patentable.

Our patent search is special because it replicates, as much as possible, how an official patent search is done at the patent office. Did you know that when you file your full patent application at the patent office, they don’t search your drawings or your written description of your patent application? They actually only search what’s in the ‘claims’.

The claims are a special part of a patent application. Each claim is only one sentence. It defines your invention a bit like a shopping list, listing the special combination of features that your invention has that you hope no one has ever come up with before. If the combination of features you list has never been done before, and if what you claim is deemed to include an ‘inventive step’, then you may well be granted a patent for that special combination of features!

In the PerfectPatent™ Search service, we do exactly the same thing- we define your invention, right from the get-go, in a ‘claim’. (We just miss out the drawings and written description as that would take a long time and cost you a lot of money!). That claim then defines the scope of the patent search- so it’s a highly targeted patent search.

But it gets better- we also draft extra claims, (called ‘dependent claims’), which define the next most important inventive features of your product concept. What does this mean? It means that if we find that your main claim (and therefore your main invention concept) is not new and not patentable, we continue to search the next most important features of your invention concept, to see whether important patent protection for them may still be possible. Again, this is just how it’s done at the patent office. So the PerfectPatent™ Search is as close as you can get to an official patent office search, without all the time, effort and cost that goes with filing a full patent application.

See some reviews below from inventors who got the PerfectPatent™ Search.

Yes. The reason is this- the results from your PerfectPatent™ Search that we do in step 1 of The Inventor’s Journey™ will often define the patenting strategy when it comes to drafting your FULL patent application.

To give an example, if prior art (previous stuff) is found in your patent search, it may well lead to us narrowing the scope of the patenting strategy to patent your invention, (whilst still trying to get your invention incredibly important patent protection). This can make it more likely we’ll be able to get you the best possible patent protection because it means we can focus the patenting strategy on that particular area.

And in the unlikely event that the patent search results show that an inventor’s invention concept is not new at all and is therefore not patentable, we would not want that inventor to lose time and money going for a full patent. It would be better to save the money and go on The Inventor’s Journey™ again with another invention!

If you want to understand this more, this video shows why it’s important to do a patent search even before filing a provisional patent application. But it’s even more relevant in terms of getting a patent search done before going for a FULL patent: