GitHub - gozman/patent_tinder: The easiest way to get through reviewing a pile of patents

2 min read Original article ↗

Patent Tinder

The easiest way to get through reviewing a pile of patents

What is this thing, is it a joke?

It's not a joke. I was reviewing patents for a freedom to operate study my company was running. As part of this study, a patent expert provided me with hundreds of documents to review in order for me to get a good understanding of the landscape and flag any that I'd like to study in further depth.

These lists were provided as massive excel files generated by their fancy patent search tooling and were completely unsuitable for any kind of human reading. So I built a tool to present the information to me one patent at a time so that I could quickly make a decision to either:

  1. Dismiss the patent.
  2. Flag it as interesting for a secondary screening.

How do I use it?

  1. Clone this repository
  2. Convert your list of patents into an array of JSON objects that have a format similar to the one shown in patents.js. PROTIP: You can use an online CSV->JSON converter to accomplish this once you CSV export from Excel.
  3. Pour yourself a glass of scotch and get to reviewing and swiping as per the directions shown on screen when you open index.html in your browser.
  4. When you're done, press x to download the JSON array of interesting patents that you can then fire back at your patent expert

License

GPL v3