Performing post-grant check of the issued claims

Once in a while, the Patent Office may inadvertently use the wrong claim set in the issued patent, so ClaimMaster lets your make sure that the issued claims are the same as the last claim set submitted to the USPTO.  Specifically, it will compare the claims in the open Word document to the claims of the specified patent, such as shown below:



Getting Started

To perform post-grant claim check, perform the following steps:


  • From the ClaimMaster Ribbon, click on the Individual Proofing Tools menu, then select Post-Grant Claim Check:


Feature Options

Once you select the feature above, ClaimMaster will open the following dialog. 


       


    1. Type in the issued patent # here.  If ClaimMaster can detect an application number in your document header, it will look up the appropriate patent number for this application number using USPTO's PEDs as the data source. 
    2. If selected, ClaimMaster will compare only independent claims in the claim set.
    3. This section specifies various claim comparison options:
      • “Full text” – compare the full body of the claim against the full body of another claim.
      • “Limitation-by-limitation” – compare only across sequential limitations. However, if limitations are out of sync, this mode will not provide results that are as accurate as with the “full text” mode.
    1. Specifies whether to output the comparison in HTML or Word format
    2. Press this button to compare the claims in the currently open document (e.g., the last response to the Office Action prior to allowance) to the claims of the issued patent.  Hopefully, you should not see any differences in the claims.