Cut through the noise: How Results Chat refined 200+ patents down to 18

The Challenge: Drowning in Search Results

You’ve just completed a comprehensive patent search. The good news? You’ve found everything potentially relevant to your query. The bad news? You’re staring at 200+ patents, and you need to identify which ones truly matter for your specific technical requirement.

Does this sound familiar? Whether you’re conducting prior art searches, competitive analysis, or freedom-to-operate assessments, the volume of results can be overwhelming. Reviewing each patent individually would take days or even weeks, time that most organisations simply don’t have.

The traditional approach presents a difficult choice: either invest enormous resources in a comprehensive manual review or resort to sampling, risking the potential to miss critical patents buried in the results.

The Old Way: Manual Patent Review

If we focus on what traditional patent search refinement looks like, it’s most likely defined into these 4 categories.

Time-consuming: Reviewing 200 patents at even 15 minutes per patent means 50 hours of work. That’s more than a full work week dedicated to a single search.

Incomplete: Most teams can’t afford that time investment, so they sample. Maybe they review the top 50 results, or spot-check every tenth patent. But what if the most relevant patent is number 73?

Risky: Missing a critical patent in prior art analysis can invalidate your prosecution strategy. Overlooking a blocking patent in an FTO analysis could mean costly litigation down the line.

Frustrating: Your patent professionals didn’t train for years to spend their time on routine screening tasks. They should be doing substantive analysis, not initial filtering.

Introducing Results Chat: Ask Questions, Get Answers

Results Chat fundamentally changes how you interact with large patent result sets. Instead of reviewing patents one by one, you ask targeted questions across your entire result set simultaneously.

Here’s the key insight: you already know what you’re looking for. You have a specific technical requirement, a particular claim element, or a defined product feature. Results Chat lets you express that requirement as a natural language question and instantly see which patents in your result set address it.

How It Works

The process is straightforward:

1. Run your search using your preferred search strategy and export the results
2. Load the results into Results Chat (up to 500 patents simultaneously)
3. Ask your question in natural language, such as: “Does the invention disclose wireless charging above 15W with foreign object detection?“
4. Review filtered results with citations showing exactly where each patent addresses your query

What Happens Behind the Scenes

When you ask Results Chat a question, the system:

• Analyses every document in your result set for the specific disclosures you’re asking about
• Returns a filtered list of truly relevant patents, dramatically reducing your review burden
• Includes citations for each answer, allowing you to verify the analysis and dig deeper into relevant sections
• Processes up to 500 patents simultaneously, ensuring comprehensive coverage without sampling
  

The result? You go from 200+ potential patents to a prioritised list of 10-20 highly relevant references in minutes instead of days.

The Value: Speed, Comprehensiveness, and Actionability

Speed: Minutes Instead of Days

Time is money in patent work. Every day spent on manual review is a day not spent on strategic analysis, prosecution, or innovation. Results Chat reduces search refinement from days to minutes, letting you move quickly from search to insight.

Comprehensive: Every Patent Analysed

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Results Chat is comprehensiveness. Unlike manual review, which often requires sampling or spot-checking, Results Chat analyses every single patent in your result set.

With patent analysis, relevance isn’t always correlated with ranking. The patent that perfectly anticipates your invention might be result #47, not #1. Traditional approaches that focus on top results or sampling might miss it entirely. Results Chat won’t.

Actionable: Immediately Identify Priorities

Results Chat doesn’t just filter, it prioritises. By identifying which patents specifically address your requirements and providing citations, it creates a clear roadmap for your detailed review.

Your patent professionals can immediately focus their expertise where it matters most: analysing the patents that Results Chat has identified as truly relevant, with specific guidance about which sections address your query.

Real-World Applications

Prior Art Screening for Patent Prosecution

When preparing a patent application or responding to an office action, you need to understand the prior art landscape. Results Chat lets you ask questions like:

• “Does this patent disclose [specific element of our invention]?”
• “Do any of these references teach [particular combination]?”
• “Do the claims mention [specific technical problem]?”

Freedom-to-Operate Analysis

Quickly identify potentially blocking patents from large FTO search results:

• “Do the patents have claims that would cover [our product feature]?”
• “Is the patent active and enforceable?”
• “Does the invention cover [specific implementation detail]?”

Making the Shift: From Searching to Finding

The traditional patent workflow treats search and analysis as separate, sequential steps: first, you search, then you manually review everything to find what’s relevant.

Results Chat collapses this into a more efficient cycle: search, refine with targeted questions, then focus your analytical expertise on the truly relevant subset. It’s not about replacing human expertise; it’s about amplifying it, ensuring that your patent professionals spend their time on substantive analysis rather than routine screening.

Ready to transform how you handle patent search results?

Join our webinar to see Results Chat in action! Register here.

Contact us to see or request a demo using sample data from your technology area.