Quote from Martin Schweiger on January 20, 2022, 3:08 pm

We start with an amount of S$ 5,000, and there will be an intermediate report that comes with a suggestion for the next step.

Client could watch my video about patent searches, the FTO search starts at minute 09:26
https://ip-lawyer-tools.com/lesson/first-applications-pubcodes/

A Freedom-to-Operate search (FTO) is entirely different from a prior art search: we need to make sure that we do not overlook any relevant patent or patent application. For the FTO, we need to know much more than what we know now: we need to widen our search and look for the relevant applicants, inventor names and IPC patent classes that are related to the client’s invention.

After we have identified the relevant IPC patent classes, we can find out the number of potentially relevant patents and patent applications over the past 18.5 years (18.5 years because the maximum life spam of a patent is 20 years and because it takes 18 months from filing to publication). Once we know the number of potentially relevant patents and patent applications that we need to evaluate, we can estimate the costs for the FTO evaluation

You can expect the costs to be S$10,000 with no upper limit.

After we have done the first (limited) FTO and if client decides that he wants more security and wants to invest more money, we can always broaden the FTO search.

Please note that there will never be a 100% security for not infringing a patent, and this is why costs for an FTO in principle are unlimited. There is always one more patent to look at: our databases contain about 80,000 patent publications for Singapore.

In other words, the effort for increasing the completeness of an FTO increases in a non-linear manner, and that there is always a remaining risk that a possibly relevant patent is overlooked. The attached picture illustrates this effect.

In the case that the client wants the FTO analysis to be limited to the patents it identifies and provides to us, it is not possible to quote on a per patent or per claim basis.

What we can do is an overview evaluation and we can dive deep where necessary.

One thing is sure: we will never give client a guarantee that he will not infringe.

So it is all about setting the expectation right. I would suggest that we focus on those claim elements that are obviously not present in the new device, and we write a one-pager for each element, why it is not there. Then one element is about one work hour.

So we have an estimated S$ 5,000 for this, in an intermediate report, plus an estimate of the total costs for completing that work. The $5k will be regardless of the number of patents the client wants is to look at.

The deliverables are, for each earlier patent:
- legal status
- claims (broken up into claim elements)
- matching with the new device
Plus we state where the intermediate report needs improvements and an estimate of how much the final report will be.