If you have been watching the robust marketplace for patent practice products you will surely wonder “Could anyone come up with a new idea for a patent product?”  Well yes. Petition.ai has focused on a very narrow area of patent law where there has been no coverage… and they own the space…….. Petition.ai has  identified a “niche of need” helping lawyers search and compare patent examination petitions. Founder Michael Spector describes it as “haystack of needles”  otherwise difficult to find.

 

Here’s what I learned talking to the founder of petition.ai. Every year over 300,000 patent applications are filed in the United States Patent Office. About 15% of those applications require a change after filing or about 40,000 petitions. These petitions range from the mundane – request to accelerate examination to the career saving  – reversing an accidental abandonment of a patent by clicking the wrong box or accidentally disclosing confidential information.  Until now, lawyers might have to rely on their firm’s DMS to find a similar petition, but there was no easily searchable public or commercial source available for the PTO Office of Petitions filings and examiners rulings.

Use Cases Petition.ai currently includes 500,00 petitions going back to 2016. Here are some ways that Petition.ai can be used:

  • Find a model of petition on the same issue that has been granted. Provides links to PDFs of documents.
  • Get valuable intelligence on the specific petition examiner who will be reviewing your petition. Contact examiner in advance to ask drafting and timing issues.
  • Manage client expectations regarding history of similar petitions.
  • Analytics are still being developed but currently include: grant/denial rate for specific issues, grant/denial rate by law firm.

Pricing – the product is priced based on the number of patents filed by the firm in the prior year.. It is really smart to avoid basing cost on the number of attorneys and instead focus on the metric of need. Price is based on the number of patents filed by the firm in the prior year and assumes that each firm needs access to petitions for 15% of their applications. Price per firm ranges from $500 – $7,500 a year.

Future Developments will include adding  time to grant analytics and expanding the database retroactively.