Analysing the legal status of a patent family can bring about many insights into the strategy of the Assignee on a particular invention. However for a patent professional reading into every legal status event for each family member can be a tedious job and can even take days.

With the legal status timeline chart, PatSeer makes it easy to interpret the legal events that happened across family members and identify patterns that may directly link to the corporate strategy on the invention.

Now what precisely do we mean by graphing legal status when it comes to patents? Legal status information is an important component of patent information as it determines

• Whether examination of a patent application is still pending
• Whether the application was withdrawn or rejected
• Whether a patent has been granted and is still valid
• Whether a granted patent has expired, lapsed or been revoked due to an opposition

The legal status timeline analyses all the events across family members showing how the legal status has changed over a period of time and it even displays the events occurring for designated status in case of EP, WO. Further since reassignment events are also displayed in the chart (with the new Assignee name displayed) so the same chart can also work as a Reassignment Timeline chart (also called as a Ownership timeline chart)