PATENT

1.a) PCT/RO/101(PCT Request) accompanied by description, claims, abstract (and drawings if required) of the invention in English or Hindi

b) Power of Attorney

c) Sequence listing (if any)

2.Preparing and Filing national phase PCT applications of Indian applicants in the PCT member countries within 30 or 31 months from the priority date of Indian patent application.

3.Preparing and Filing national phase PCT applications in India within 31 months from the priority date of application for International clients.

The team of United & United assists its Clients by providing a legal support through the entire IP Litigation Lifecycle. The firm has a highly qualified and experienced team of Lawyers; Patent Attorneys and Engineers who have an in-depth understanding of the legal and technical issues and handled the bundle of research and analysis of various forms of IP towards litigation support.

We offer a complete Litigation support by providing the following services:

• Evidence of Use (EoU) Charting
• Claim chart construction
• File wrapper review and analysis
• Patent invalidation searches cum opinion on the basis of assertions
• Infringement analysis/Arguments
• Drafting and Filing of IP Litigation Suits
• Fetching relevant Case Laws on various databases including DartsIP and Manupatra

PATENTABILITY OR NOVELTY SEARCH

A patentability search is conducted to determine if an invention meets the requirements of

• Novelty;
• Usefulness (industrial applicability); and
• Non-obviousness (inventive step).

Novelty Searches/ Patentability Searches are asked for to gather a hoard of technical information or “prior-art” pertinent to the invention to assess its patentability based on novelty and non-obviousness/inventive step.  This search is usually performed prior to the preparation of the patent application.

Note: For a Patentability/Prior Art Search there are no date constraints. Also it is not jurisdiction specific.

At United & United, the patentability search involves the following steps:

1. Listing out the broad keywords and drafting a search query based on the keywords using various operators
2. Finding out the relevant classification codes to classify the category of the invention.
3. Finding out the relevant patent applications using subscribed patent databases.
4. Conducting a non patent literature search.
5. Developing a search report along with our detailed analysis and opinion on patentability of the invention in question.

Time Frame – 5-7 days

A Freedom to Operate Search is conducted to give an overview on the patent environment with respect to your product, to ensure that the release of the client’s product will not cause any form of infringement in the market.

• It is restricted to only active or enforceable patents.
• Non-patent literature, scientific journals, etc. are not relevant in this search as they do not form potential threats.
• Jurisdiction of interest is a very important aspect while performing the search .
• A time period about 20 to 22 years is considered as the life of a patent.

An FTO is usually performed to identify access and mitigate the loss involved the commercial launch of a product. FTO is conducted in the following scenarios ;

• Risk;
• Due Diligence;
• Launch of a Product

FREEDOM TO OPERATE SEARCH (FTO OR CLEARANCE SEARCH)

At United & United, the FTO involves the following steps:

1. Listing out the broad keywords and drafting an extensive search query using various operators.
2. Finding out the relevant classification codes to classify the category of the invention.
3. Finding out the relevant enforceable patents using subscribed patent databases for a specific jurisdiction in particular Orbit and Total Patent.
4. Interpretation of the patent claims and specification of the results retrieved in the FTO Search analysis.
5. Developing a search report along with our detailed analysis and opinion on the FTO for the products or services or process.

Time Frame – 10-12 days

INVALIDITY/VALIDITY SEARCHES

Invalidity/Validity Searches are exhaustive Prior Art Searches conducted to either validate the claims made by a patent or to invalidate one or more claims of a competitor’s patent.

It is a confirmation to the applicant that the patent can withstand litigation and its validity is undisputable, and no claim can be raised on the basis of prior public use or a prior invention.

For each search, we provide a Claim chart representation of each Prior Art, wherein we define each element of the claim w.r.t. its functioning as mentioned in its description. A thorough and detailed analysis of all references is provided which includes feature to feature mapping.

Time Frame – 10-12 days

TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE

• The patent search is carried out in patent and non-patent databases.
• The search starts with selection of relevant keywords and their synonyms and is followed by a class based search, assignee-inventor search and citation search.
• Broad or old technologies can lead to thousands of results while narrow or new technologies can lead to hundreds or some time tens of results.
• Once the search is completed, the results are analyzed thoroughly and the valid results are listed in the form of graphical representations, wherein the Information is represented using a combination of graphs, pie-charts, bubble charts and 2-D and 3-D charts which disclose the white space in the technology

The report contains relevant trends and insights to easily understand the current position of the technology in question along with a customized taxonomy of relevant results and recommendations along with an exhaustive patent bucket, consisting of relevant classes, assignee and inventors.