Compare Claim Amendments in File History

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ClaimMaster lets you to quickly compare claim amendments in the IFW file history downloaded from the Patent Center. This tool can be very helpful when you are trying to determine how the claims have changed during prosecution of a particular patent, such as when analyzing the issued patent during or in preparation of litigation.


To identify any differences between incremental claim amendments in file history using ClaimMaster, perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to Patent Center

    Open Patent Center in any browser, lookup the desired patent or publication by the application, publication, or patent #. Then navigate to the Documents and Transactions tab

     patent center navigation

  2. Download XML documents from Patent Center

    In the Documents and Transaction tab, select all claims in the file wrapper that you want to compare. You can just select all items in the IFW section and click to download XML documents only, as shown below. You’ll probably be warned that not all selected items are available in XML, but you can ignore this warning. After you select XML option from the dropdown, your browser will download a zip archive to some default location, typically “Downloads”.
    patent center XML download

  3. Launch Claim Compare Tool

    From the ClaimMaster tab, click on the Time-Saving Tools menuthen Compare Claims:

     claim compare menu

  4. Switch to Prosecution History tab

    In the “Compare Claims” window, switch to the In Prosecution History tab – this is where you’ll be able to compare claim amendments.
    prosecution history tab

  5. Select the downloaded IFW file and Compare Claim Amendments

    Point ClaimMaster to the IFW archive you’ve previously downloaded from the Patent Center. ClaimMaster will automatically pull out only the claims documents from the archive, so you don’t need to worry about having additional documents in there. Once you specify the file, lick on Compare Claims button.
    compare claim amendments

  6. Review the Comparison Result

    Once ClaimMaster finishes processing and analyzing all claims documents in the IFW archive, it will bring up an HTML page showing comparison of claim amendments in the file wrapper. By default, differences between the very first and the very last set of filed claims will be shown, but you can also compare between any other amendments (sorted by date) by selecting from the dropdown menus for claim set #1 and claim set # 2. You can see a sample HTML comparison report here.

    amendments compare results


For more information on these features, check out the Online Manual.