Westlaw Patents + Thomson Innovation: The Best of Both Worlds

by Jay Shuck, West Customer and Product Documentation

If you or your organization practices patent law, you need easy access to a wide range of U.S. and foreign patents, scientific literature, and legal materials. You need efficient ways to follow links between related materials. You need ways of understanding, integrating, and presenting vast amounts of information.

And you don't need more runaround.

That's the thinking behind Westlaw Patents + Thomson Innovation. This joint offering brings together more content, research tools, analytical material, and support to enable you to work smarter throughout the entire patent process.

"We have these great assets available from different parts of Thomson Reuters, and we're always looking for ways to integrate or present them together to customers," says Karl Evert of Thomson Reuters. "Customers get access to both these offerings from within the Westlaw session using a single password and can be charged on a single bill."

Although both platforms offer U.S. and European patents, Derwent, and news, Westlaw Patents and Thomson Innovation are each strong in particular aspects of patent research. "Thomson Innovation offers a rich set of analytical and collaboration tools not available in the Westlaw interface," says Evert. "Those include content cross-searching, multicolored highlighting, text clustering, and ThemeScape. If customers have any experience with Delphion, Thomson Innovation is a major enhancement in content and functionality. We've delivered major enhancements this year on Westlaw with European patents, searchable U.S. patent file histories, Markman orders, several time-saving graphical display tools, and some really slick linkages between all these pieces."

At any phase of the typical patent work process—from research to prosecution to the protection and assertion of rights—Westlaw Patents + Thomson Innovation can shorten the process and give a busy practitioner more confidence that nothing was overlooked. Here's a phase-by-phase look at this joint offering:

Research and innovation
U.S. and international patents (Westlaw Patents and Thomson Innovation), related documents (Westlaw Patents), and scientific literature (Thomson Innovation) allow you to do in-depth worldwide prior art research, identify and track inventions, and review the strategic landscape.
Application and prosecution
When you need to develop a filing strategy and do comprehensive U.S. and international patent research, turn to patent family trees (Westlaw Patents), Westlaw Profiler® information for examiners and judges (Westlaw Patents), and Derwent World Patents Index® (DWPI) data (Westlaw Patents and Thomson Innovation). You can easily integrate DWPI, INPADOC, and other patent data into a single record (Thomson Innovation).
Monitoring and maintenance
You can uncover connections between patents using KeyCite® (Westlaw Patents) and monitor worldwide patent activity with scientific literature and citation mapping (Thomson Innovation). You can also use data landscaping and clustering tools (Thomson Innovation).
Licensing and commercialization
Practitioners performing due diligence can review treatises and other analytical material from Westlaw Patents and retrieve patent family information (Westlaw Patents) and English-language translations of international patent data (Thomson Innovation). Those preparing documents can export data into preformatted reports and charts (Thomson Innovation).
Protection and assertion
You can use claims versioning, Markman materials, court documents (Westlaw Patents), and citation-mapping technology (Thomson Innovation) to review changes that affect patent claims.

New access point

So how do you access Thomson Innovation? You can get there via a convenient link during your Westlaw session. Click Link to Thomson Innovation under Patents, Applications, and Assignments on the tabbed Patent Counsel, Intellectual Property, or Westlaw Patents page. After you click the link, a page is displayed that indicates that your Westlaw hourly billing is suspended.

If you do not subscribe to Thomson Innovation, this page states that access is not included in your current subscription. You can click Learn More About Thomson Innovation for information on subscribing. If you already subscribe to Thomson Innovation, you can click a button to continue to the Thomson Innovation Patent Search page or return to Westlaw.