Main reasons for prior art inconsistency

Have you ever worked with a professional prior art searcher for high technology or science? If yes then you know what kind of report you will get at the end of the project. Certainly, you will pay for the search because you do not have the prior art information you are looking for. Nevertheless, you expect the search results to be highly relevant to the claims or product of interest. What patent litigation support professionals or patent attorneys have found is they do not find any consistency in the output provided by prior art searchers. Sometimes they are successful in producing a very accurate set of relevant references. But, at times they miss out important results and produce a large list of references that waste patent attorney's time in sorting out things and client money as well. This kind of inconsistency shown by prior art searchers exposes a more threatening underlying problem of missing very relevant existing prior arts.

It is wrong in saying that it is completely a fault of prior art searchers. The searchers are not able to solve the problem no matter how carefully they search. These searches require two types of expertise. First, you need a patent drafting/preparation expert with good hands-on experience in classification or text search techniques. The expert should also know the tricks of trade required for quickly and thoroughly searching various global patent databases and non-patent literature. Secondly, you need a subject matter expert of the claims of interest in order to find out what is relevant and worth considering. Along with this, you will also need a validated methodology, so that the two experts can work together without wastage of time and money while maintaining the consistency in finding the relevant prior art.

Patent litigation support and patent drafting/preparation support experts highly recommend the selection of registered searchers who have conducted many searches across international patent databases. Pairing a search specialist with a technology specialist whose expertise matches the claims of the products is bound to produce cost-effective, highly reliable and consistent results for the clients.

You can have access to professional patent search experts by taking help of Internet. Today, all patent search service and patent litigation service providers have an online presence. You can visit these websites to know more about the services they provide. You can also check the reviews to find out whether they meet the expectations of their clients or not. By doing an exhaustive research, you will definitely end up finding a search expert who will meet your requirements.