Our Pre-Filing Budget Searches can help to establish the scope of claims to be drafted and to avoid unnecessary office actions, in circumstances where the cost of a full patentability search is not warranted.

These searches are carried out using a technique called Convergence Searching, which starts with highly focussed class, keyword or combination searches through selected patent sources and uses promising results as the springboard for extending the search within the allotted time.

The cost of a Pre-Filing Budget Search is currently set at £400.

We offer a similar pre-filing service for pharmaceutical compounds in the situation where broad Markush-style claims are being filed and one wishes to check that these are not too widely formulated. Chemical Structure Pre-Filing Searches are slightly more expensive due to the database costs involved and usually need some interaction with the client to arrive at a realistic structure for query generation.