Robert Ambrogi Blog
After returning from the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in San Antonio last week, I wrote about having seen previews there of major changes in the works for Fastcase, Lexis Advance and Wolters Kluwer. I also wrote last week about WellSettled.com, which I learned about through conversations at AALL.
But these were not the only products that caught my attention there. Here are a couple of others worth noting.
Ravel cofounder Daniel Lewis at AALL.
Ravel
Ravel is a case law research platform that uses visual tools to help you more quickly identify key cases. I covered it extensively in a piece I wrote for the ABA Journal, Visual Law Services are Worth a Thousand Words–And Big Money, so I refer you there to read more about Ravel. But after interviewing Ravel cofounder Daniel Lewis for that piece, I was happy to get to see him in the flesh at AALL, where Ravel was a first-time exhibitor.
Darts-IP
Darts-IP is a global case law database exclusively for IP law. It has trademark, patent, design and domain name cases from some 2,660 courts worldwide. Designed are analyzed and classified by legal topic, making them searchable by points of law. Plus it compiles data on case outcomes and company performance in court cases and office actions. Besides its unique focus and coverage, what makes it standout is its powerful search and analysis tools. Cases can be search by party, by patent or trademark, or by other parameters. A search for a company can include all of its subsidiaries, no matter what name they go by. Searches can be narrowed to specific jurisdictions or regions and filtered by action type. Search by points of law to determine which international forum is likely to be most friendly or hostile to your claim.
Patent Advisor
Patent Advisor is a new product from Reed Tech, a LexisNexis-owned company, that takes data from the USPTO’s Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system and lets you slice and dice it in ways that give you deep insight into the patent approval process and into the examiners who drive the process. With Patent Advisor, you can view extensive data and statistics about every examiner, including how long they take on average to grant a patent, how long they take with specific types of patents, and how well the examiner fares on appeal. You can also evaluate how certain companies or even certain law firms fare with specific examiners. The purpose of this product is to help lawyers, IP professionals and business owners make more-informed decisions about their patent strategies. Are you pouring money into a matter that is unlikely to go anywhere? If you are involved with patent prosecutions, you should request a demonstration to see everything it can do.
PrivCo
PrivCo is short for Private Company Financial Intelligence. It provides business and financial data on major non-public corporations. It claims to go to great lengths to obtain and validate its data, and it ties its financial data to information on M&As and fundings to help its clients track private market activity. Its clients include Google, Bain Capital, Merrill Lynch and Andreessen Horowitz, so it must be doing something right. The database can be searched by company or subsidiary name, and also by various characteristics, such as location, employee counts, industries, etc. You can also search the database for private investors, VC funding rounds, M&A deals, and private equity deals. Of course, all of this data doesn’t come cheap. The current price for a one month subscription is $499 — and that is described as a limited time half-off deal.