When we talk to organizations with effective IP strategies, one of the most consistent things we hear is the importance of a well-organized IP portfolio for making decisions about new IP generation, IP maintenance, and licensing. At a fundamental level, this means grouping together similar IP. Similarly, identifying similar IP is a critical component of competitive analysis and external IP landscaping.

However, creating groups of similar patents, either for your own patent portfolio or across other organizations' portfolios, presents a major challenge. Given the complex legalese used in most patents, using keyword searches is problematic at best. Using indicators like forward citations can be helpful, but even that assumes someone else conducted a thorough prior art search.

To make life easier, we created an automated similar patent tool, which uses our comprehensive classification network analysis process to find similar patents within a company or across multiple organizations.

Our Similar Patents tool is integrated into our IP Portfolio Builder to help you build comprehensive portfolios of related patents. Once you have added your first patents to a portfolio, you can start looking for similar patents to add to the project.

From the Patents Tab, select one or more patents using the check boxes on the far left of the patent table. From there, click the “Similar Patents” button at the top of the table.

This will generate a list of patents from your organization covering similar technologies to the patents you selected. If you want to look beyond your own organization, select the ORGANIZATIONS filter at the top of the similar patents list to change organizations or select all organizations.

Select the patents you want to add to your project and click add. The data in the overview, patents, and partners tabs will all update to reflect the new patents.