According to the 2019 AIPLA Report of the Economic Survey, the average filing cost for a patent application is $12,000, but the average total cost, including Office action responses, appeals if you need them, filing fees, PCT and PPH costs, and maintenance costs, ranges from $30,000 to $60,000. A typical patent may go through two or three rounds of Office actions and attorney responses to the Patent Office before it is granted. Most companies we talk to pay little attention to the patent prosecution process beyond the initial filing. Indeed, they have little visibility into the process once they have given their approval and their application has been filed. They talk to their outside counsel when they provide a patent disclosure at the beginning of the process, and don’t engage again until the patent is issued, which could be two years and tens of thousands of dollars later.

Stop and consider how much more cost effective your company could be if you could access a consistent set of patent analytics and decision points at each step of the portfolio development cycle. This is where Rowan and our patent drafting software can help.

Going Beyond Docketing Systems

We think visibility into the black hole of patent preparation and prosecution is crucial. Currently, many people use docketing systems like Anaqua, IPfolio, and CPA Global. These systems can show you that a patent application has been filed. They can also show you that an Office action has been filed, and a response is due by a certain date. What they may not make clear is that you are looking at the third Office action, and with that particular assigned Examiner, there is only a 2% chance your patent will be issued after this point in the process. Having access to clearly presented analytics at that level of detail from your patent drafting software can give you, the patent portfolio owner, the ability to more effectively assess whether you wish to continue making an investment in that asset.

Our end-to-end Rowan Patents solution pulls together all of the data you can possibly glean from every conversation that every patent filer has ever had with the Patent Office while prosecuting a patent, at least since this data has been digitized. We can run a tremendous number of patent analytics on this trove of information. While other tools like Juristat, PatentOptimizer, ClaimMaster, and Patent Advisor also run analytics, these only facilitate an isolated step of patent development; they do not provide an integrated drafting environment that makes this data visible to the patent owner at every step along the way.

Data-Driven Decision Making

With Rowan Patents, on the other hand, you can bring your data into the decision-making process from the beginning. Starting with your invention disclosure, you can run Rowan’s algorithms against your disclosure language to predict whether you are likely to land in a favorable Art Unit of Class Code. You can see whether or not your disclosure is likely to be novel in its area, or face a 102 rejection. Access to Rowan Review is built into the Rowan Patents patent drafting software so that your draft application can be analyzed whenever you wish. You can get updates on performance against the previously described metrics and warnings you on issues that may result in 112 rejections or objections to informalities. Each time you run Rowan Review on an application draft, you’ll receive a quantitative view on how your application is improving, so that your assessment of your application draft can be founded in data, and not merely subjective. Rowan Review can later be run on draft Office action responses to ensure their quality and clearly inform you on your Examiner’s granting rates after first Office actions, second Office actions, etc. allowing you to better assess whether or not to continue funding patent prosecution.

If you are a patent manager, with applications being drafted in the Rowan Patents integrated drafting environment, you’ll be able to see what’s going on with all of the patents in development at all of the law firms you work with, across your entire portfolio. You will see indicators as to whether they are following the data. You can tell if a firm continues to work on patents that are questionable in terms of novelty, or whether there are errors in the application that should be removed before it is filed. If your firms and drafters are working in a standard word processor, or even in tools like ClaimMaster or PatentOptimizer, there is no way for you to have that level of clear visibility in real time.

This is the real power of the Rowan Patents end-to-end solution. No other suite of tools both supports each step of the process and fully integrates the data from every step into one place. At Rowan, we connect those dots, letting you see the entire picture of your portfolio at a glance.

If you are a patent manager, with applications being drafted using Rowan Patents software, you’ll be able to see what’s going on with all of the patents in development at all of the law firms you work with, across your entire portfolio.