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Patents and e-Discovery: An Obvious Yet Novel Connection

Andie Linker

Litigation support teams always need new ways to add value to their clients, whether it’s through providing search expertise, helping with tight deadlines, or finding the smoking gun that much faster. As customers seek more value from their partnerships, differentiation becomes increasingly important. So, solutions that create value across practice areas as well as throughout a case lifecycle can be game-changing.

Responding to these customer needs, litigation support teams are finding creative ways to add value in different practice areas for their customers. In the Relativity community, some have discovered that a new solution built on RelativityOne can help their teams deliver on those three familiar areas of expertise—search expertise, time savings, and speed to results—to an entirely new practice group, in a platform they already know inside and out.

That tool is Relativity Patents, bringing industry-leading technology to patent search and workflow directly into RelativityOne.

At Relativity Fest 2022, our Relativity Patents commercial and product leaders, Drew Deitch and Jim Witte, walked attendees through the solution and showed just how easy we’ve made it to find and act on the critical data in your teams’ patent matters. Here’s a quick look at how it works.

A Traditional Patent Search Workflow

For patents litigators, timelines and budgets are tight, and answers need to be delivered clearly and concisely. And the stakes are high! If your client is accused of infringing on a patent, a good defensive litigation strategy can save them hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours in court.

This is one of the most typical use cases we’ve seen with Relativity Patents customers. A law firm’s client has been accused of infringing on an existing patent. They may be accused of infringing on an entire patent, or just a piece. Either way, the team needs to disprove this claim quickly and cost-effectively.

The intellectual property team’s first move is to do a prior art search and to weaken or disprove the alleged infringement. Traditionally, this can take weeks, with multiple parties lending a hand with the search, and lots of cumbersome keyword and complex searches across patent data archives.

Then, once they find the relevant patents, reading them is slow. There are sometimes hundreds of patents to review, and it’s hard for case teams to know which are important until they’re done reading it. But reading just a single patent in detail can take up to an hour.

As this process progresses and the team collects evidence, IP lawyers must build their work product, which means copying and pasting text out of the relevant patents and into a claim chart. Again, the traditional process is quite manual and involves many hours of reading and re-reading to find, capture, and share the relevant information you need.

So, this is the landscape of patent searching today. Until Relativity Patents, intellectual property teams lacked any unified solution to search, review, and create work product on one screen, iteratively. In fact, our own IP team’s struggle with this workflow was the original inspiration for Relativity Patents.

How Relativity Patents Works

Smart Searching

The right tech makes all the difference in transforming your next patent project. Users simply drop target patent and/or key concepts into Relativity Patents to kick off a search. Select specific sections of a patent to focus on, or use the entire text.

Relativity Patents combines conceptual analytics and keyword searching to scour the world of patents archives and pull the ones that are potentially relevant to your case. It also assigns each resulting patent a conceptual similarity score to help prioritize review. The closer the score is to 100, the more relevant the patent may be.

Faster Review

Once the initial result list is prioritized, Relativity Patents helps users drill down into the exact paragraphs within each patent that might be most relevant. So rather than having to start at page one with each potentially relevant patent, users can jump to the most interesting paragraphs within each patent, and then decide whether to review it in detail.

Gone are the days of reading dozens of pages of a patent only to find there’s nothing worthwhile in it. Relevant sections are color-coded to the original conceptual queries, making it easy to match paragraphs of interest to issues in a project.

Automated Claims Charts

After finding the relevant prior art, Relativity Patents lets users add notes to the most important snippets and save them directly to a claim charts. Creating and exporting a claim chart transforms the workflow from copy/pasting hundreds or thousands of times, to just a handful of clicks. Attorney work product can be exported into pre-designed Excel or Word templates, with your notes and references included automatically.

With Relativity Patents, users can save the hours previously required to search, review, copy and paste over and over. And case teams can bring the same efficiency to patent matters that they’ve come to expect during eDiscovery--a sound litigation or pre-litigation data strategy, on-budget and within their deadline.

Take a Closer Look at Relativity Patents

If you’d like to learn more about this solution and how it could impact your team or your clients, jump into the Relativity Fest event platform before December 16, 2022 to watch the session recording. (You can still register for access to all session recordings, if you haven’t already.)

You can also read about how Ulmer & Berne has found success with Relativity Patents, or contact our team for more information and to request a risk-free trial.


Andie Linker is a member of the product marketing team at Relativity.

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