Companies, large and small, all need to ensure that, as far as possible, their potential product, or process, will not infringe any existing products or patents. In this training class we will review what is FTO, when and how to prepare for FTO searching and analysis, how to stage an FTO exercise according to the product development stage, and what you can do when your budget is limited. Keeping a project log, writing up your strategy, understanding how to decide on relevance of retrieved art is included. The training will also cover how to analyse the results, and how best to report your findings.
This course is aimed at those with some experience of patent searching who need to extend their expertise in freedom to operate search and analysis. We recommend that attendees have undertaken CIIPM’s Core Patent Search Skills training or a similar course.
Course Outline
- Why, when and how FTO exercises should be undertaken.
- FTO scope and comparison to other search types.
- Search skills for FTO.
- Bibliographic searching
- Inventor and organisation name searching.
- Examiner, and applicant citation searching.
- Subject searching
- Handling broader and narrow concepts.
- Searching in other languages.
- Specific subject skills (biology, chemistry, engineering, devices).
- Searching around the claims of identified documents.
- When to stop your search?
- Practical session.
- Demonstration of a model answer.
- Analysis for FTO purposes.
- Analysing the claims in relation to description and drawings.
- Divisionals and continuations.
- Claims trees, structure and claims analysis.
- How to review pending applications.
- Examples from US, EP, WO, GB
- Reporting of results.
- What to include in an FTO report.
- Presenting your results to attorney, senior management or investors.
- Storing your FTO results and searches.
- Establishing patent watches.
- Maintaining a black list.
- Re-executing search, analyses and reporting.
Who should attend?
Those working in R&D, Intellectual Property managers, IP Engineers, Innovation managers, Technology innovators, strategic business development roles, Trainee Patent and Trademark attorneys.
Training provided by:
Jane List, Extract Information
Stuart Newbold, PSIM
