A patentability search is the cheapest way to find out that you should not file.
A prior-art search looks for what already exists in your field: issued patents, published applications, products, and papers. It is the one step that can save you the entire cost of everything after it.
Drawings from expired US patents. Lit: US 1,475,024, Garrett A. Morgan, Traffic Signal, filed 1922, granted 1923.
What the search is actually looking for.
Novelty is only half of it. An examiner also asks whether your invention would have been obvious to someone skilled in the field, and obviousness can be built from two or three references combined.
A useful search therefore does not stop at the closest single hit. It maps the neighborhood: what sits nearby, what an examiner could reasonably combine, and where the genuinely open space is.
We report back plainly, including when the space is too crowded to be worth a filing fee. Our managing partner spent seventeen years deciding which applications cleared that bar, which is the same judgment a search calls for.
What you receive
- The references found, with the closest art called out and explained
- A written opinion on novelty and the obstacles we expect
- A recommendation on whether and how to file
- A call to walk through what it turned up
Typically two to four weeks, depending on the technology.
Questions we get about this.
What is a patentability search?
A patentability search is a review of existing public information to judge whether an invention is likely to be new and non-obvious enough to be patented. It covers issued patents, published applications, and non-patent sources such as products, papers, and manuals.
It is done before filing, so the money it saves is the money you would otherwise spend drafting and prosecuting an application that was never going to issue.
How do I do a patent search?
Anyone can search the USPTO's public databases and Google Patents for free, and it is worth doing before you call anyone. It will tell you whether something obviously identical already exists.
What a free search will not do is judge obviousness, which is where most rejections come from. Deciding whether two existing references could be combined against your claims is a legal judgment about how an examiner will read them.
What is the difference between a patentability search and a freedom-to-operate search?
They answer different questions. A patentability search asks whether you can get a patent. A freedom-to-operate search asks whether selling your product would infringe someone else's live patent.
You can be free to patent and not free to operate, and the reverse. If you are about to commit to a launch, the freedom-to-operate question is the one that carries commercial risk.
Do I have to do a search before filing?
No. The USPTO does not require one, and some applicants skip it to save time. The examiner will search regardless, so the prior art surfaces either way.
The difference is when you find out. Before filing, a bad result costs you the search fee. After filing, it costs you the drafting, the government fees, and the prosecution.
What does a patent search cost?
Less than any other stage of a patent matter, and far less than the prosecution it can prevent. We quote it before starting, so you approve the cost before we begin.
For crowded mechanical fields the search is usually the highest-value money in the whole engagement, because that is where it most often changes the plan.
Tell us what you built.
Describe the invention and we will tell you what a search would need to cover and what it is likely to find.