Patent Search

A patent is a 20-year monopoly, but only if the invention is genuinely new and only if your product does not already collide with someone else's in-force claims. Before you spend lakhs on drafting, filing fees, and multi-country prosecution, it pays to answer two specific questions on evidence rather than optimism: is this invention patentable, and is the freedom to sell it already taken in your target markets?

A patent search is the document that answers those questions. We run patentability, freedom-to-operate, landscape, and validity searches across WIPO PATENTSCOPE, the Indian Patent Office Inpass system, USPTO, EPO, JPO, CNIPA, KIPO, and commercial databases — plus non-patent literature where it matters. Every search closes with a written opinion a patent agent will sign, defensible in First Examination Report responses, pre-grant oppositions, investor diligence, and litigation.

At a Glance

• Who runs this: Founders, R&D leads, IP managers, in-house counsel, investors during diligence, and litigators preparing opposition or invalidity actions.
• Search types covered: Patentability, freedom-to-operate (FTO), landscape, invalidity, infringement, and state-of-the-art.
• Governing law: Patents Act 1970 and Patents Rules 2003; jurisdictional rules apply in each target patent office.
• Databases covered: WIPO PATENTSCOPE, Inpass, USPTO, EPO Espacenet, JPO J-PlatPat, CNIPA, KIPO, plus commercial paid databases where budget supports.
• Non-patent literature: IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, PubMed, ArXiv, technical standards, and product manuals — critical for software and biotech disclosures.
• Turnaround: Patentability 7-14 days; FTO 14-21 days; landscape 21-30 days; validity 14-28 days.
• Deliverable: Written opinion signed by the assigned patent agent, with claim mapping, ranked references, and risk scoring.

What's New for FY 2026-27

Patent searching has changed materially in the last two years. AI-assisted ranking has matured, the Indian Patent Office's digital workflow is faster, and several offices have refreshed their classification schemes. Here is what affects your search this year.

• AI-assisted semantic ranking: Most serious search platforms now layer transformer-based similarity scoring on top of classification and keyword searches, surfacing references that pure-keyword strings miss — especially for software, ML, and mechanism inventions.
• CGPDTM digital workflow: The Indian Patent Office's e-filing and Inpass interfaces are noticeably faster in 2026, with cleaner full-text downloads and better OCR on older filings.
• IPC 2026.01 reclassification: The International Patent Classification was reissued in January 2026 with new subclasses for digital health, additive manufacturing, and energy storage; older filings have been re-mapped, which affects classification-based searches.
• DPIIT and SIPP support: Startups recognised under DPIIT continue to qualify for fee rebates and the Startups Intellectual Property Protection (SIPP) scheme, which subsidises part of search and drafting costs.
• Non-English Asian filings: Machine translation of CNIPA, KIPO, and JPO filings has improved enough that prior art from these offices is routinely usable — the references that defeat applications are the ones cheap searches still miss here.
• Patent (Amendment) Rules 2024 in effect: The simpler Form 27 working-statement format and the relaxed Form 3 filing window now apply across post-grant compliance — relevant when a search supports an opposition or revocation.

Why Run a Search Before You File or Launch

• Avoid sunk cost on drafting: Drafting and filing a full specification across India plus one foreign jurisdiction runs ₹2-5 lakh; a patentability search at a fraction of that cost tells you whether the spend is justified.
• Sharper claim drafting: When prior art is mapped before drafting, independent claims can be written around it from day one — fewer office actions, faster grant, broader claims that survive examination.
• FTO before launch, not after: A cease-and-desist after launch is a board-level crisis; an FTO search before tooling commits gives you design-around time and the option to license proactively on your terms.
• Investor and acquirer diligence: Any serious investor will commission their own search; walking in with a signed opinion and a claim-narrowing rationale puts you ahead of every other deal in the queue.
• Validity for opposition: If someone has asserted a patent against you, an invalidity search hunts the references the original examiner missed — the standard route to revocation under Section 64 or pre-grant opposition under Section 25(1).

How It Actually Works

A patent search is not a database query. It is a structured project — scope, classification, query, multi-database execution, human review, written opinion. Here is how the work breaks down.

Step 1: Search Brief and Scope (1-2 days)

We start with a one-hour call to capture the invention or product, the specific question you need answered, and your jurisdictional footprint. Search type — patentability, FTO, landscape, validity — drives the databases, date filters, and budget. Scope is confirmed in writing before any clock starts.

Step 2: Classification and Query Construction (1-2 days)

The assigned patent agent identifies IPC and CPC codes that map to the invention, then builds tuned keyword strings with synonyms, stemming, and proximity operators. Citation seeds are pulled from references the inventor already knows, and citation-chain expansion runs forward and backward from those seeds. For software and biotech, non-patent literature sources are scoped in parallel.

Step 3: Multi-Database Execution (3-7 days)

WIPO PATENTSCOPE, Inpass, USPTO, EPO Espacenet, JPO J-PlatPat, CNIPA, and KIPO are searched in sequence using both classification and keyword strings. Commercial databases like Derwent, Orbit, and PatBase are added where budget supports — these contribute family data, legal status, and semantic ranking. Results are de-duplicated, family-grouped, and ranked by relevance.

Step 4: Human Review and Claim Mapping (2-4 days)

Machines stop here and the patent agent takes over. The top 30-80 ranked references are read fully. For patentability, the closest references are mapped against your claim concepts feature by feature. For FTO, in-force claims are read against the product's bill of materials, process flow, or software architecture and risk is scored per reference.

Step 5: Written Opinion (1-2 days)

The opinion is drafted, peer-reviewed inside the firm, and signed. For patentability, the opinion takes a position — patentable as filed, patentable with claim narrowing, or unlikely to be patentable. For FTO, risk per reference is ranked high / medium / low with design-around or license options. For validity, grounds for revocation are mapped against the asserted claims.

Step 6: Monitoring and Refresh (optional)

For competitor-watch and ongoing R&D programmes, the search becomes a standing service. Named competitors, named assignees, and classification codes are monitored monthly or quarterly; new filings are flagged within days of publication. Patentability and FTO searches are refreshed before each major filing or product launch.

A Real Example: ML-Based Fraud Detection

A Bengaluru fintech wanted to file a patent on an ML model that scores card-not-present transactions for fraud risk using device-fingerprint plus behavioural-biometric features. India sales today, planned US entry within 18 months, ₹3 lakh budgeted for IP that year. The patentability and FTO scope ran as follows.

• Patentability scope: Global, all patent literature, all dates up to the proposed priority date; IPC codes G06Q 20/40 (fraud detection), G06N 20/00 (ML), G06F 21/57 (security).
• Database hits: 412 raw results across WIPO, USPTO, EPO, and CNIPA; 78 after de-dup and family grouping; 11 high-relevance references after agent review.
• Finding: The core 'score CNP transaction using device plus behavioural features' idea was anticipated by two US filings from 2018 and 2020; the specific combination with a temporal session-graph layer was novel.
• Outcome: Opinion recommended filing with a narrowed claim focused on the session-graph layer; the startup filed a provisional in India and saved roughly ₹1.5 lakh by dropping a US filing it would have lost.
• FTO scope: India only, in-force patents only, target product launch within 12 months; identified one Indian filing with a granted claim overlapping at the device-fingerprint step.
• FTO outcome: Design-around — switching from full-device-fingerprint to a tokenised partial-fingerprint avoided the granted claim entirely; the change was documented in the opinion with engineering-ready reasoning.

Total search spend: about ₹85,000. Total spend avoided: a US PCT national-phase entry that would have been rejected, plus an infringement letter post-launch. The signed opinion sat in the company's data room and shortened the IP section of their next round's diligence to a single paragraph.

Search Types Decoded

• Patentability search: Asks whether the invention is novel and inventive globally; looks at all prior art — granted, lapsed, expired, in-force, anywhere — because anything published before your priority date matters.
• FTO (freedom-to-operate): Asks whether you can sell or manufacture in jurisdiction X without infringing an in-force patent there; only in-force patents in the target jurisdiction count, and the search is product-specific.
• Landscape / state-of-the-art: Shows the competitive map for a technology area — who is filing, where, with what claim language, and where the white space sits — used for R&D direction and M&A scoping.
• Invalidity / validity: Hunts for prior art that defeats a specific asserted patent; used in opposition under Section 25(1) pre-grant or 25(2) post-grant, revocation under Section 64, or as a defensive counterweight in negotiation.
• Inventor and assignee search: Maps the patent activity of a named inventor or company; used in hiring decisions, M&A diligence, and competitor watch programmes.

The fastest way to waste money on a patent search is to ask for the wrong type. A patentability search will not give you FTO comfort, and an FTO search will not tell you whether the invention is novel — scope determines value.

Where It Goes Wrong

• Google Patents alone: Useful as a first sniff test, but it under-indexes Asian collections, has no IPC / CPC classification searching, no claim mapping, and produces no opinion you can rely on for a six- or seven-figure filing decision.
• Skipping non-patent literature: In software, biotech, and mechanical innovation, the killer reference is often a journal paper, conference proceeding, standards document, or product manual — none of which sit in the patent databases.
• Wrong jurisdictional scope on FTO: Patent rights are territorial; running an FTO across 30 countries when you only sell in 3 is wasted spend, and limiting it to 1 when you export to 5 leaves real risk uncovered.
• Stale searches: A patentability search from 18 months ago is no longer current — refresh before filing, especially in fast-moving areas like AI/ML and biotech where prior art lands weekly.
• DIY claim mapping: Even when references are found, mapping in-force claims against a product or against your draft claims is a patent-agent skill — getting this wrong on FTO is the source of most post-launch surprises.
• Confusing search types: Asking for 'a patent search' without specifying patentability vs FTO vs landscape produces a document that answers no specific question well — scope the brief first.

What You Receive at the End

• Written opinion signed by the assigned patent agent, defensible in FER responses, opposition proceedings, and investor diligence
• Executive summary in plain English — go / no-go, file as-is or narrow, design around or license
• Annotated reference list with hyperlinks to each database record and full bibliographic details
• Closest prior art with feature-by-feature claim mapping (patentability) or in-force claim mapping (FTO)
• Risk ranking by reference: high / medium / low with reasoning recorded against each
• Design-around or claim-narrowing suggestions where applicable, with engineering-ready language
• Search log: databases queried, query strings used, date filters applied, hits per query — fully auditable
• Recommendation on next step: file, refine, abandon, monitor, or refresh

How to Get Started

Send us a short invention or product summary, the specific question you need answered, and your target jurisdictions. We respond within one working day with a fixed-scope quotation, an agent profile, and a realistic timeline. There is no obligation, and the brief discussion is treated as confidential under NDA from the first message.

If you are filing on a deadline — priority anniversary, examination response window, or product launch — flag it in your first message and we will turn around scoping inside 24 hours. For recurring competitor monitoring, we set up named watches and deliver the first digest within two weeks of kickoff.