Analytics and Technology

Analytics and Technology

HBW’s clients include high tech and other innovative companies that are constantly evolving the way they conduct business. We understand this level of creativity — our firm is also dedicated to the same evolutionary process. We remain focused on ensuring that the best modern processes are employed to deliver the highest quality results to our clients in the least amount of time.

Our current practices include a secure paperless cloud-based Document Management System and collaborative tools, such as desktop sharing used both during off-site interactions with clients and interactions with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Specifically, we utilize four major software packages in serving our clients, including Innography, PatentAdvisor, WebEx and Lex Machina.

Innography

The firm uses Innography in order to deliver more comprehensive solutions regarding patenting strategy for clients. Innography includes a variety of intellectual property business intelligence applications and patent tools that enable us to work with our clients to achieve the best possible return on their patent investments.

We use Innography to better understand the patent landscape in specific technology fields, including information regarding the quantity and nature of competitors’ filings, as well as for patent litigation matters involving patents in the specific area of technology. Innography includes visualization tools to help our clients uncover who is working on what technologies of interest to our clients, and to what extent they are investing in their patent portfolios.

PatentAdvisor

HBW utilizes PatentAdvisor to provide more predictable results for our clients when prosecuting patent applications through the USPTO. PatentAdvisor is a suite of patent analytics tools designed to provide information from the USPTO patent database. PatentAdvisor enables us to leverage publicly available patent information while saving our clients both time and money throughout the patent prosecution process.

Using this tool, we can review and analyze historical statistics for individual Patent Examiners, as well as entire USPTO technology areas. We use individual Patent Examiner statistics to predict what procedural avenues are most successful with a given examiner or art unit and then recommend the avenue most likely to meet our clients’ goals. We use the statistics for a USPTO art unit to help formulate effective overall strategies for clients having inventions in that technology area.

Our data driven approach to patent prosecution helps us better arm our clients with positions and tactics that have been successful in the past. PatentAdvisor also allows our attorneys to bring predictive analytics to patent prosecution and patent portfolio management. We are better able to understand how individual Patent Examiners and technology art units have responded to previous applications, and to more ably estimate the general workflow and timelines for those examiners.

WebEx

HBW uses WebEx online meeting products to obtain disclosures from inventors and to work with examiners. Inventors are comfortable, from their exposure to online tools, using WebEx to explain and demonstrate their innovations from their desktop. We can record inventor demonstrations for later extraction of GUI examples to include in applications. Examiners are encouraged by the PTO to use WebEx with applicants, as WebEx is the tool used internally for examiners who work at home to attend art unit meetings. Like other online tools, WebEx supports video conferencing, switching presenters, sharing desktop files and applications, and jointly annotating documents.

Of particular note is HBW’s decade of using WebEx with Patent Examiners. Ernie Beffel was instrumental in persuading the PTO to train Patent Examiners to use WebEx during the prosecution process. He piloted the use of WebEx beginning in late 2005, announced general availability for interviews at the AIPLA 2011 Spring Meeting, and has remained involved with the PTO’s interview management team. As a result, we have developed effective strategies for making WebEx examiner interviews even more productive than in-person interviews.

Lex Machina

Lex Machina gives our attorneys the ability to analyze judges, courts and litigation across all venues, learn about opposing counsel, evaluate various parties involved in a given matter, and research and devise patent-related strategy.

Lex Machina has developed a catalog of legal data derived from court cases and documents on intellectual property law. The information is compiled together and converted into searchable text files that our lawyers access through subscription. The majority of the data provided by the program is optimized for patent information, along with other important intellectual property-related topics.