A Revolutionary Claims Comparison Tool: The Evolved Claim™ Report on Patent Workbench®

The Claims Matrix is just one of many cutting edge claims tools available through the Patent Workbench^® Reader. Today we’ll look at another tool that will change the way you analyze patent file histories: the Evolved Claim™.  The Evolved Claim™ allows you to see the complete evolution of the claims in a list view. You can select one or multiple claims and view text comparisons between each consecutive version of the claim. The most revolutionary feature, however, is that the tool displays a single Evolved Claim™ which shows, at a glance, all changes that occurred to the claim from the time it was introduced until the time it became a patented claim or was cancelled.

Read on to learn about the process of creating an Evolved Claim™ report, and why this claims tool will make your file history analysis more efficient and thorough!

Generating the Evolved Claim™ Report

The Evolved Claim™ is located under the Claims Tools module of the Patent Workbench^® Reader.  On the selection view, click on the check boxes to select or unselect claims to include in the Evolved Claim™ report. If a checkmark appears in the box to the left of a claim number, the claim will be included in the report. For example, in the screenshot shown below, application claims #1 and #4 will be included on the report.

Select the claims to appear in the Evolved Claim™ report.

The user can also choose the “Select All” option to place checkmarks in the boxes beside all claims, or unselect the option to clear all boxes.  If the user wants to see the text of the claim along with the comparison results, they can select the check box next to the option “Include claim text with comparison results.”  After selecting the desired claims and the “Include claim text” option, the user clicks the “Create Evolved Claim™” button to generate the report.

Select "Create Evolved Claim™" to generate the report.

A message box will alert the user that the Claims Comparison results are generated based on a text comparison algorithm, and the user can select to disable this message for the rest of the session.

You can select to disable this message box for the remainder of the session.

Reading the Evolved Claim™ Report

The Evolved Claim™ report is made up of several parts:

• The legend shows a list of papers on which this claim or claims is mentioned. Each of the papers is designated by a code such as A, A2, A3, or P.  Click on the paper names (the blue underlined text) to quickly access the original paper in the file history using the embedded PDF viewer.

The legend for the Evolved Claim™ report.

•  If the user chose to include the claim text on the report, then the text for each version of the claim will be displayed before each claim comparison.

The claim text can be displayed on the report.

• The claim comparison section allows you to quickly compare one version of a claim to the previous version (chronologically) of the same claim and visually see the differences between the two.   In the example shown below, the (2003-Oct-21) Application is being compared with the (2005-Mar-15) Amendment.   The text that is surrounded by a border shows the difference between the two versions of the claim.
  •   Text that is red with strikethrough was deleted.
  •  Text that is green and underlined was added.

The claim comparison section.

• The Evolved Claim™ shows, at-a glance, all changes that occurred to the claim from the time it was introduced until the time it became a patented claim or was cancelled.   Using the legend displayed in the screenshot below, you will notice, among other things, that the word “Presently” (in the first line) was added in paper A5 which is the amendment dated 2006-Aug-30 and then deleted in paper P which is the patent dated 2007-Apr-03 Patent. In addition, the word “combination” (also in the first line) was deleted in paper A1 which is the amendment dated 2004-Oct-13.

The Evolved Claim™.

After generating the report, you can choose to print the Evolved Claim™ report or export it in .doc format.  You can then return to the claims selection view and generate a new Evolved Claim™ report by clicking the “Back to Select Claims” option which appears at the top of the report.

Benefits of the Evolved Claim™ Report

• Easily show the difference between two versions of a claim, with the option to display the claim text above the comparison results.
• Quickly determine in which papers, and when, changes were made to claim text during the prosecution history.
• Effortlessly view all changes made to a claim in one place, summarized in a simple format.
• Export this report to .doc format to share with clients and colleagues.

Would you like to test the features of Patent Workbench^®? Request a free sample file to try the Patent Workbench^® Reader today!

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