Empowering Outside IP Counsel for Medical Device Competitive Awareness & Partnering

Perception Partners assisted an international IP law firm to systematically inform their client’s counsel on key players & IP for unmet needs in ablation therapy leading medical devices. 

Challenge: Monitoring known and emerging market players for freedom-to-operate (FTO) risks and IP development opportunities related to ablation therapy devices. Partnering is ongoing in this part of the industry, and IP positions of the client, competitors and research ecosystem need constant review. 

Organizing a trusted IP landscape dataset. Patents, applications, news, scientific literature and trials were gathered into an IP landscape dataset and visualized within our secure cloud-based Intellar dashboards platform. This extensive collection of thousands of global documents underwent expert curation and categorization to match a taxonomy sketched out by the counsel team and extended by ours. To ease the workload, a focus was also placed on identifying and highlighting records of highest relevance. 

Accelerating patent risk awareness over time. The ablation devices IP landscape that we developed was maintained and updated over a 3-year period. This structured approach allowed members of the IP counsel team to engage in ongoing awareness, inform client meetings, capture emerging regulatory news, and proactively address emerging IP risks. Over this time period we systematically reviewed references, identified relevant claims and highlighted mentions of critical business & clinical milestones – while tagging these items in the landscape dashboards for closer legal review.

Results: Counsel stays on top of breaking information and ahead of competitive moves. Reliance on a trusted and precise IP landscape with systematic online updates helped counsel and their client watch competitive innovation, patenting, trials and approvals in a professional and systematic manner for long-term value creation in life-saving medical devices.