Thomas Spinelli, Managing Partner at New York-based firm Scully Scott Murphy & Presser (SSMP), uses Juristat to help break down the nuances of patent data, including examiner behavior, and highlight his firm’s positive effect on profitability.
Here is how SSMP uses Juristat:
The right data can supercharge your patent prosecution strategy and help keep an application on track toward an allowance.
“Juristat’s overall impact has been very good, mostly as a marketing tool, but also to determine a prosecution strategy as well as a filing strategy,” Spinelli said.
SSMP uses Juristat data to inform whether certain claim terms will maximize the possibility of steering an application to a more favorable art unit or minimize the likelihood the application would receive certain types of rejections, such as a 101 rejection.
Using Examiner Reports, SSMP attorneys can revise their response strategy based on the specific examiner’s allowance rate with or without an interview, or typical behavior after the first, second, or third response.
And now, SSMP and other Juristat Analytics subscribers can take advantage of Juristat’s powerful filtering capabilities on Examiner Reports. Rather than defaulting to the examiner’s typical behavior across all applications, Juristat subscribers can now apply filters based on date range, application type, or more, narrowing their evaluation to a dataset that more closely mirrors the specific scenario in question.
Managing client expectations and ensuring they are aligned with the prosecution strategy can be challenging. There’s no better way to back up your decision-making than with data. Spinelli says that Juristat has been very beneficial when explaining examiner statistics to clients, particularly foreign clients.
Notably, Spinelli referenced an occasion where a client wanted to pursue an interview with an examiner. However, using Juristat, SSMP found that the examiner’s allowance rate actually decreases when an interview is conducted during prosecution. That quick search in Juristat helped avoid a possibly costly prosecution misstep.
Data from Juristat also makes it easier for SSMP to share success stories with potential new clients, driving the firm’s marketing and new business development strategy.
Before the firm used Juristat, telling that story took a lot of challenging manual calculations of USPTO data. Because of this, Spinelli said it was difficult to demonstrate their success and efficiency at the USPTO relative to other firms.
Particularly, Spinelli said they use data points like allowance rate to demonstrate success and the number of office actions to allowance or final disposition to demonstrate efficiency. Juristat’s comparison charts make it easy to show off SSMP’s performance relative to other competing IP firms as well as their clients’ industry competitors.
Spinelli admits that some of the benefits of using Juristat may seem adverse to better profits for the firm. After all, Juristat’s industry-leading data had Spinelli’s team working faster and smarter. Being more efficient at the USPTO can lead to billing fewer hours, right? However, his team has leveraged that position to their benefit and grew their business.
“Juristat has helped us build better and stronger relationships with clients, leading to greater volumes of work,” he said.
Spinelli and his team at SSMP find that the data from Juristat helps them improve client relationships and better their bottom line while being easy to use.
“Overall, we are not only very satisfied with the use of the product,” he said. “But we are also happy with the level of training received and available as well as the technical support."
Want to see how SSMP and other firms and in-house counsel use our industry-leading analytics to drive prosecution strategy and increase revenue? Schedule a demo today.