The job of an intellectual property attorney is getting tougher all the time. During the past 10 years there has been a steady rise in patent applications, and sorting through them can be tedious work.
Thankfully, IP attorneys can thank Steve Lundberg, managing partner at Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner, for making that process easier. Lundberg's latest invention, ClaimBot Systems, is a computer program that eliminates many of the mundane steps involved in analyzing IP portfolios. "I got the idea sitting at the pool at an American Intellectual Property Law Association meeting in Palm Springs in January 2005," he says. "The idea for ClaimBot came from the realization that many companies now had so many patents-a number have 20,000 or more-they could no longer keep track of what they had and also had a very difficult time readily identifying their own most valuable patents."
There are many portfolio analysis programs, but most only derive information from key words. ClaimBot is more advanced; it can sort, rank and analyze patent claims, as well as provide customized results for those who are interested in buying a patent portfolio. "It also makes everything more accessible for the person who isn't up to speed with the language [of IP]," says Lundberg's colleague Suneel Arora.
But computer programs, in the end, are just tools for talented patent lawyers. "We stay away from complete automation," says Arora. "We put in some human intelligence."
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