How to Do Effective Patent Pruning?

How can you prune your patent portfolio?

• Segregate patents 

This is the first step in analyzing a patent portfolio. First, you need to identify which patents are core and non-core to your business. Core patents are those that protect the company’s core technology. Besides core patents, all patents are non-core patents. Further, patent pruning process can include two additional factors such as market applicability and future relevance for selecting patents for pruning.

• Bundle similar patents

After segregating patents, you can group similar patents and bundle them. You can categorize patents based on technology jurisdictions, application areas, and domains. This can be done by using patent landscape techniques/business intelligence methods.    

• Sort patent sets (patent bundles) 

Patents sets identified as being of low quality and therefore subject to pruning are further sorted on certain key variables based on decision-making bandwidth and risk tolerance. Those key variables are as follows:

1. Patent Life: A patent protects for 20 years, and with each passing year, the maintenance fees also increase. This period can be shortened by not paying the maintenance fees. You can intelligently analyze the market applicability or future relevance of old patents and prune irrelevant patents to save costs.
2. Patent Family Size: Every patent family has two types of patent members. The first type of members protects similar inventions in different jurisdictions, whereas the second type of members protects different aspects of inventions in the same or different jurisdictions. It is an important variable to prune the patent. It is very important to know that a large number of patent members in a patent family also means that it will require a large investment during filing and will be expensive to maintain. Therefore, patent family members can be abandoned or maintained based on a comprehensive analysis of particular invention potential in a jurisdiction.
3. Forward Citations: A relevant patent-protecting technology will always have citations from other players in the market. More forward citations from other organisations operating in the same domain indicate a high potential for the patent. Based on this, patents with few or no citations can be pruned.
4. Citations per year: “Citations per year” means at what rate a patent is cited in a year. More citations per year show an increase in the market potential of the patent. These patents play a crucial role in preventing competitors from seizing market share. That is why it is an important variable for filtering out patents based on their growing market potential.
5. Self-Citations: Self-Citations help you decide whether a patent holds significance or not for your organization. The main reason why it is an important variable to prune patents is that a patent is only cited by a company when it protects its core technology. This means high self-citations equal to a high chance that a patent is related to a company’s core technology. This way, you can prune the patents that have the fewest or no self-citations.

After sorting patents with this process, your organisation knows which ones are not relevant. If these patents are infringed by others, then, these patents could be sold to relevant buyers. If in the end, these patents are neither relevant nor infringing, you can simply choose to prune the patents by abandoning them.