Patentability Search Services

Before Filing: The Most Important Search You Will Do

A patentability search is an investment in informed decision-making. Patent prosecution typically costs $10,000-$30,000+ in attorney fees. Prosecution that ultimately fails — because prior art was found during examination that a thorough pre-filing search would have identified — wastes that entire investment. A $200-$500 patentability search that reveals blocking prior art at the pre-filing stage is the highest-ROI IP activity available to an inventor or startup.

But the value of a patentability search is entirely dependent on its technical depth. A search that finds what is easy to find — patents with similar titles and keywords — has limited value. The search that matters is one that finds what is hard to find: the prior art in different technical domains, using different terminology, in non-patent literature sources that most IP search firms never consult.

Our Patentability Search Methodology

We begin with engineering-level claim analysis — reading the invention disclosure as a POSITA (Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art) would, understanding every technical element at its underlying physical or algorithmic level. Before any database is accessed, we have mapped the invention to its functional elements and identified every technical domain where those functions have been implemented — including domains that appear unrelated to the invention's stated field.

We search:

• USPTO, EPO (Espacenet), WIPO (PatentScope), JPO J-PlatPat, CNIPA — full global patent coverage
• IEEE Xplore — essential for semiconductor, wireless, AI, power electronics, automotive electronics
• ACM Digital Library — computing, software algorithms, HCI
• 3GPP Technical Specifications and Working Group documents — mandatory for wireless and cellular patents
• arXiv — preprint repository covering AI, physics, materials science
• PubMed — biomedical and life sciences literature
• Google Scholar — cross-domain academic literature sweep
• ETSI, IEEE standards documents — standards-essential technology

What You Receive

A structured report with: (1) search strategy and databases covered; (2) annotated prior art references with relevance analysis; (3) claim element-by-element mapping against top references; (4) prosecution strategy recommendations; and (5) identified patentable aspects that appear novel over the searched art.