Traditional prior art search limitations

Bruce Sunstein is a respected intellectual property attorney, having successfully operated Sunstein LLP in Boston for over forty years, now bringing his practice over to Merchant & Gould PC. Over his decades of practice, Bruce has been exposed to a wide range of prior art search techniques but finds traditional techniques inefficient and often inaccurate. Since keywords are technology specific and terms of art can change over time, critical references can easily be missed. Even after spending days searching, there’s always some uncertainty as to whether the relevant subject matter has been captured by the combination of keywords searched. 

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“Since keywords are technology specific and terms of art can change over time, critical references can easily be missed.”

Finding the right keywords can be nearly impossible

When Bruce received a validity search mandate from a client for a simple invention, he and his team faced a serious challenge running a traditional keyword search. There were many ways to describe the technology, so reducing the search to keywords and identifying every synonym was nearly impossible.

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Clerq's concept-based search saves the day

Bruce turned immediately to Clerq as a first step for this project. Using Clerq's full-text concept-based search techniques, he identified a spot-on reference within minutes. After some iteration, two additional highly relevant references emerged as top results. A search of this nature would normally take weeks to turn around, but leveraging Clerq's natural language search and its intelligent refinement process, Bruce completed the search and his analysis within the same day.   

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“A search of this nature would normally take weeks to turn around, but leveraging Clerq's natural language search and its intelligent refinement process, Bruce completed the search and his analysis within the same day. ”

This enormous time savings translated into a significant cost savings for his client. Replacing traditional keyword-based searching with Clerq's unique approach proved invaluable for this client.