New Program on Intellectual Property very useful to Law Students and IP Professionals

<<Law students and IP professionals can use this new patent program to conduct research, such as courtroom research, and find other content on patents that will provide them with necessary information. This will prove to be beneficial when current students become future attorneys looking for specific patents available in full text.

Peter Vanderheyden, the vice president of global intellectual property for LexisNexis, said that "after a lot of market research, they found out that viewers wanted good, solid, clear content," and that is what, he said, they set out to provide with TotalPatent^TM. With more than 22 collections (aka 22 countries) involved, according to Vanderheyden, this new search system crushes its competitors, who allegedly only have access to around seven collections at the most.

TotalPatent^TM is also the only resource in its market that has close to 50 million "compressed and searchable" PDFs. If an attorney wants to search for a specific patent for a specific court case, he or she can go directly to the PDF and search within the document itself.

Vanderheyden told us himself, straight from Holland, that he is happy with what this new program is providing and will provide to its users.

"We are very excited. We are making [patent searching] seamless," he said.

Vanderheyden added that attorneys can use the LexisNexis® PatentOptimizer^TM to get a "claims tree" and that they can also see what terms are legally exposed and what terms are being used with respect to the patent.

"[It] allows people to have the access [to] the information people need in context," Vanderheyden elaborated. Attorneys can search not only claims that they need to know about but also what inventions do and what is legally protected by their patents. They can look up the inventors as well.

TotalPatent^TM is primarily aimed at IP professionals, but Vanderheyden said it is also very relevant to "a law student focused [on studying] intellectual property."

TotalPatent^TM has a few other notable features. The program automatically saves users' work for 24 hours. It also holds about 20,000 documents in one single folder that includes other organizational options. Additionally, attorneys can cut and paste the information they need to retrieve and search within the patents themselves. Users can choose to look at patents in four different ways, including via a "list" view or a two-way comparison view. There are also patent translators, and users can download patents in multiple formats.

TotalPatent^TM is also the only resource in its market to include a "British-granted patent" option, which is now available electronically from the TotalPatent^TM system, although originally it was not included.

The program also includes an "alert" feature that allows the person whose patent is being used to be informed of who is using his or her information and for what purpose. The program obtains patents through a combination of sources. Its patents primarily come from the government, but it also has a set of its own sources to provide more patent documents for its users.

Future attorneys can also search using the program's "law by topic" option, which allows an attorney to highlight a claim and search journals for past details on that topic. By the end of the year, according to Vanderheyden, the company is planning to have 500 journals; right now, it has 200.

Access to this system is not cheap, though. While LexisNexis® is a bit more affordable and more readily available, TotalPatent^TM is going to cost you. For students, a subscription costs about $250 per month. For larger firms and corporations, a discount is offered. If you can afford this innovative program, you can easily purchase access to it online through the LexisNexis website using a credit card.

• See Top 10 Reasons Most Law Firms Have No Idea How to Hire and Evaluate Patent Attorneys for more information.