Technical Design Consulting

Providing meaningful technical design consultations

When developing new products, Brooks Kushman can assist in locating white spaces in the patent landscape to aid its clients in identifying new technical concepts that may be advantageous for new technological development. Our attorneys can assess existing technologies and develop a patent map to outline the participants in the current market and evaluate their patent coverage.  Similarly, we are able to identify technology areas that your competitors are obtaining patent protection for which may be indicative of where your competitors are heading to with respect to their technological road map.

Brooks Kushman also routinely engages in patent clearance related activities for new products that are being developed to identify problematic patents to mitigate intellectual property risks.  In many cases, when a product has already entered into the marketplace, it may be too late to engage in work-around solutions with respect to competitor’s patents.  By partnering with us early in the development process, we are able to identify problematic patents and also provide design around options in a manner that fits within your product development cycle to give you the confidence you need that your product may be free of patent infringement controversies.

If the product has been developed and is being sold marketplace, we can also assess the relevance of an asserted patent(s) to the product to determine if the product infringes any of the claims of the asserted patents.   If it’s not possible for a product and any proposed design around options to avoid the claims of a patent, Brooks Kushman also engages in invalidity searching to locate prior art references that have an earlier disclosure date than an asserted patent to invalidate the claims of an asserted patent.

Patent Services for Technical Designs

In addition to understanding the technical factors involved with a product, Brooks Kushman has extensive experience in matters related to patents, including novelty, patent infringement, and validity issues. In our technical design practice, our patent services may include:

• – Novelty searches and novelty opinions to determine patentability for new inventions
• – State of the Art searches (both domestic and international) to summarize existing prior art patents/publications to illustrate a current state of a particular field of technology
• – Clearance (or Freedom to operate (FTO)) searches and corresponding clearance opinions to identify relevant patents with claims that may be relevant to new products being developed and to determine which of these patents may be infringed or not infringed by the new product being developed.
• – Invalidity searching to locate prior art that predates an asserted patent which demonstrates that the located prior art is relevant to the claims of the asserted patent and rendering invalidity opinions which set forth the manner in which the located prior art renders the claims of an asserted patent unenforceable (or invalid).