Patent Search

Unicita Consulting Pvt. Ltd. performs comprehensive prior art patent searches to determine the patentability of an inventive concept. It is prudent for a patentee to have a thorough and comprehensive prior art search conducted prior to the preparation of a patent application. Prior art patent searches are important to determine whether the inventive concept is new and non-obvious, to draft sufficiently broad claims that are just narrower than the prior art, and to reduce prosecution history estoppel when a patent application is prosecuted.

Unicita conducts patentability searches or novelty searches to find prior art patents/patent applications that are material or relevant to the inventive concept claimed by the inventor, and also to find patents/patent applications as comprehensive as the patents/patent applications that a patent examiner will find when he/she conducts a patent search. The prior art patent searches typically comprise a Boolean keyword search and a search of the US classes/subclasses and international classes based on the International Patent Classification (IPC) and the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) in the patent databases. Unicita uses internationally accepted databases to conduct these patent searches including the Thomson Innovation patent search database of Thomson Reuters that contains patents filed in the top 71 industrialized countries including all European countries, Russia, China and Japan and patents filed with the European Patent Office (EPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (U.S. PTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the International Patent Document Center (INPADOC), the U.S. PTO database, and other publicly available patent search engines.

With highly qualified engineers employed especially to conduct these searches, Unicita provides the results of the prior art patent search and a patentability opinion in about five business days. To conduct a patent search, our team requires a detailed description of the invention, an identification of what a client considers new in the invention, a recitation of what is achieved by the final step in the invention, and a description of alternative embodiments, if any.