When You Must - Litigation Support
Although most of our efforts are dedicated to utilizing IP to enhance competitive advantage without resorting to the court system, becoming involved in litigation is sometimes unavoidable. This especially comes to light when a lucrative market position comes under serious attack from an IP perspective by a competitor.
The majority of the work that NTP-IP Innovations does to support litigation is in the area of product-claims analysis. In other words, we focus on matching actual products and services with patent claims. This analysis applies both to the plaintiff role and the defendant role.
When working in the defendant role, we will assist you in evaluating claims that have been asserted in relation to the utility functions of your products or services. Most of the time this is done in concert with your attorney to provide an appropriate response to the assertions made by a claimant.
Our assistance is focused on reducing staff interruptions when answering specific questions about operational details. We can offload many of these tasks and even setup your product in a lab to prepare a complete technical response to support the technical aspects of the case if necessary. In many situations, it is possible to prove that the competition either has invalid claims or their assertions don't relate to your product line.
In support of your role as a plaintiff, NTP-IP Innovations conducts a close examination of your competitor's offerings against your IP elements and supports the creation of a demand letter or notice of infringement. Because it is important that specific areas of your assertions be carefully constructed, we are fully equipped to provide claim charts, with detailed patent file history references for your files, giving an exact match of each argument to the subject products.
If it becomes necessary to reverse-engineer a competing product to determine infringement, we will advise you of that fact and provide an estimate for this effort on a time and materials basis.
If the need develops for expert support during a case, we will go over our opinions in detail with your counsel and make appropriate recommendations. If it is necessary to expand expert support into specific areas of your field, we will support the selection of appropriate experts to accurately match the research talent specifically to the content of the claims that apply to your case.
