Limit results to live patents only using legal status

Legal status tells you whether a patent is in-force or not. A patent that is no longer enforceable is not a threat to your product. So when searching for freedom to operate (FTO) it is common to focus on live, granted patents. There are many different legal events that can cause a patent to become "dead". We collect those events and use them to determine if the patent is likely Alive or Dead. 

How to limit results by legal status?

To exclude dead patents from your results, click on Patent status and change from All to Alive.

﹗Note: Legal status is part of your Project Settings. That means it will always be applied when you click Update results even if FILTER RESULTS are set to OFF. 

To check legal status you can look for this badge on each result

If there is a badge that indicates that there is at least one live member in the patent's family.

For detailed legal status, we recommend checking Espacenet. You can quickly do that for any patent by going to the full-text page and clicking on the Espacenet button.

How do we calculate legal status?

We start from the assumption that the patent is alive. If there is a legal event in our database that causes the patent to no longer be in-force then we update the status to dead. That means that we'll err on the side of caution and assume patents are a live threat unless proven otherwise.

Our legal event data is only available for AU, CA, DE, EP, ES, FR, GB, JP, and US. Your results will always include include all patents from countries that we do not have legal status for. If you want to ignore those countries, you can exclude them from your results with the  Patent offices filter.

Legal status is a tool to save your search and review time. For important patents you should confirm the legal status with the publishing authority and file history.