Order Patent File History

A patent beginning with its filing to a final decision (grant, publication, or rejection) takes about 2 to 3 years on an average in the major patent jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions may take a little longer based on the volume of pendency and preparedness. This period of filing to final decision is termed as the “prosecution period” of the patent, which includes firm evaluation by patent examiners. During the patent prosecution, several communications and document transactions occur between the patent office and the applicant or his/ her attorney. The collection of these communications and the documents are included in the “Patent File History,” also known as the “File wrapper,” or “Prosecution history.”

The File history includes the details of the patent application, non-final action, information disclosure statement (IDS), cited references, references critically reviewed, change of inventor or applicant name, examiner’s search strategy, and office actions including arguments, objections, responses, amendments, notices, and often the reason of allowance of the patent.

A file history based on the need can be ordered as a certified copy or uncertified copy. While a certified file history is authenticated by the patent office as being a true copy of the official data normally used in legal proceedings, an uncertified file history is ordered for internal reference and review such as during licensing negotiations to evaluate the validity of a patent, or while trying to invalidate a patent.

An uncertified copy is generally procured much faster than a certified one. A certified copy most often requires more than 30 days.

Order Patent and Non-patent Documents

Patent and Non-Patent Literature (NPL) documents play a vital role in prior art research. While the primary source of patent documents is the respective national patent office, non-patent literature exists in a boundless range of sources, and forms. For the assessment of novelty or obviousness of an invention in the stage of patentability or the after grant validity, both a patent and a non-patent literature bear exactly the equal weight.

For patent data, European patent office (EPO)  platform espacenet is a good place to start with. EPO maintains global patent data including patent documents and promotes the dissemination, and retrieval of patent data at no cost. Also a patent copy can be availed with ease if one has a license to commercial patent search databases.

However, if a patent is very old, or the patent is from a foreign country that does not store all the patent data in a robust electronic form, it becomes difficult for the European patent office, and the commercial databases to procure it and make available to the users.

Non-patent literature data, unlike patents the sources are varied and vast, uncountable. It may range from an image, research theses, and comments on a blog, product brochures, or journal articles and a document of age old traditional knowledge. This indicates that NPL is often much more difficult to find than patent literature.

We make several diligent efforts to find even the hard to locate foreign patents and non-patent documents and deliver to you in the shortest possible time.