New PEDS Integration
As you probably noticed, Public PAIR has not been particularly stable or reliable lately. In addition, the USPTO recently removed Private PAIR access to applications not listed under the same customer number. To deal with these PAIR limitations, ClaimMaster 2020 now connects to the USPTO’s Patent Examination Data System (“PEDS”) service to pull various bibliographic information for published patents and applications. In particular, PEDS now will be selected as the default data source for the bibliographic data for all ClaimMaster features that use such data.
There are many advantages to using the PEDS service: it’s very fast, does not require passing CAPTCHA, logging in to Private PAIR, or using a stand-alone widget for scrubbing the PAIR website. Theoretically, it mirrors Public PAIR data, so hopefully it reflects the same data as Public PAIR, although we have not verified this. The only downside of PEDS is that it does not provide information on the unpublished applications, which is still only available from Private PAIR.
ClaimMaster features that can use PEDS as the data source include: patent family tree generation, OA shells and USPTO form tools (including IDS forms), and cross-checking of document headers against the USPTO data.
Improved Patent Family Trees
We’ve made many improvements to the patent family tree generation in this ClaimMaster release. First, you can use PEDS as the main biblio data source for patent family trees. As a result, ClaimMaster can now construct patent family trees, even for large families, very quickly. Note that PEDS provides only published information, so if you want to include non-published applications into your tree, you’ll need to use Private PAIR. In the future release, we’ll add capability to use hybrid PEDS/Private PAIR scrubbing for constructing such trees, but for now you must select one source for the entire operation.
In addition, we’ve added the ability to supplement foreign patent family information for the US patents, where such information is available from the Espacenet. For example, if you enable “Map foreign family members” checkbox in the Patent Family Tree tool, foreign family information will be included in the tree, as shown below.
Click below to continue reading about other core features in this release:
- Significant improvements to Office Action analysis and shell generation, including Office Action Drafting Assistant
- Verify applications for various DOCX issues prior to the USPTO submissions
- Downloads and report manager
- Annotate figures with part names
- Convert regular amendments to track changes
- Improved IFW and patent downloading features
- Many other improvements, including client matter id assignment printing of HTML patent proofreading reports