Patents and Designs
Patent and Design Searches
Are you interested in conducting a search to determine whether your invention or product is new, whether your product infringes existing patent/design rights, or are you interested in technological developments in a particular field? Do you want to test the validity of a patent or design registration, or perhaps need to conduct due diligence on a company’s intellectual property portfolio.
We conduct a wide variety of searches of patent and design literature to assist our clients with enquiries such as those above.
We assist our clients determine what type of searches are appropriate given particular objectives and/or operating within a budget. We then conduct the searches and provide a report that is tailored to your needs.
Search types
The types of searches we conduct include:
Novelty or patentability investigations are typically conducted by clients that believe they have an invention that may be patentable or a design that is new. The search will seek to identify any prior art that a patent attorney can compare the invention or design with to assess if it is new (novel).
Validity investigations generally start with an existing patent or design and look for prior art that may impact the validity of claims in that patent or assertion of a design being new.
Infringement investigations start with a product and seek to identify any existing patents or designs the product would (or may) infringe.
Landscape searches are used to identify what research work is being done in a particular technology, and who is conducting it. It can also cover the developing and changing nature of designs. Such searches may assist decisions about the direction R&D should take.
Name investigations are searches of patent/design literature conducted in specific names. Name searches are often conducted to determine whether a company has IP protection in relation to a particular product.
Due Diligence investigations are searches of intellectual property portfolios to determine the current legal situation of the identified intellectual property. They are often used in mergers, acquisitions, licensing arrangements or initial public offering matters.
Documents Provision We provide copies of documents including patent specifications, human and/or machine translations of patent specifications, patent file histories, details of registered designs, journal articles, standards, and almost any document that is required by a client.
Working of Patents In some cases, it is necessary to establish nominal working of patents. Our organisation can arrange the placement of suitably worded advertisements in Australian publications for the purposes of establishing this nominal working.
Watches are regular, periodic watches of specific IP rights, competitors and/or technology fields to assist our clients stay abreast of developments that may impact on their business.