The Expert Podcast

In this video we're going to take a look at how to perform a search for different types of intellectual property for example patents trademarks domain names things that may be held or owned by a debtor that may not seem like they have significant cash value to you as a creditor however finding the origin of these intellectual property assets can help you leverage the debtor into a settlement so we'll talk about the value of these later but first we're going to talk about how to search these particular types of intellectual property.

Let's start with patents all of the different federally registered assets patents trademarks copyrights are all done through uspto united states patent a trademark office uspto.gov is the website and they have a section for patents trademarks and other properties so let's take a look at a patent search you want to put in the terms that have to do with the nature of the patent and in this search bar you can actually enter names keywords company names or whatever types of boolean search you want to use and you can also see default operator and or adjacent near same width so you can use this as a powerful tool.

So let's just take a look at you want to find patents for steve smith you put in steve smith you hit enter and it's going to tell you that there are let me see is that 1.2 million yeah 1 million 266 552 results found so that's a lot to go through 1.2 million you may need to narrow it down a little more you may need to use the adjacent or near and then try it that way see if that narrows it down that one only has 408 results found that might help you narrow down what you're looking for.

This particular patent uh is an invention that disclosed large-scale semi-rigid structure airship tells you what it is the field of the invention it gives you all the prior art references and what the patent is all about you can even print a pdf version of this if you want to look at the second record you can look at the second record so what if you have a company name well let's take a look at ajax corporation hit enter that one has six results so that's good that's a little bit less of a issue to go through also it'll tell you the name of the inventors todd ortberg zachary blueband glenn backus.

So it's another way sometimes of finding people associated with a company even if you're not looking for a particular patent if you want to find out who's associated with the ajax corp look todd ortberg actually it's charles todd or ortberg may not be listed in the corporate records in minnesota as a corporate officer but he's an inventor so this is another way to cross reference names and corporations using the u.s patent trademark office because sometimes a person is credited with a trademark or a patent but not necessarily on the corporation so you can use this to your advantage.

And here's your other tools you can switch the image view you can print it let's see what imageview looks like here's the actual patent application it's a pdf file with a drawing of that particular patent you can look at the next one all the different pages of that patent application you can then go to the next patent document number two number three and each one of these in this list of however many there were six results are going to be listed in this application it's powerful information there are millions and millions of records that can be searched.

You can also search for type of patent let's say to take a look at aircraft it's a little bit of a broad field so you might want to narrow it down a little bit for aircraft there are 486 5446 this looks like some kind of a drone connected to a computer let's see what the text says this is a aerial photography technique to disclose an aircraft control method and an aircraft the aircraft control method includes a flight control system configured to control its you know technical so you can see it in text you can also see it in the document you can print it if you wanted to you could save it to your computer you can have different preferences for how big you want it to show up on your screen and again you'll have names of parties that are associated with the patent i won't try to pronounce these names but you can see that it will give you the names of the related parties.

Searching these patents is extremely valuable now the one trick or i should say pitfall to avoid is don't try to do this quickly when an investigator does any type of research what you're going to do is you're going to pull all these documents maybe not 486 000 you may want to narrow it down but pull all the documents let's say the last example they had six different patents pull all six print them out get all the pages and read through them thoroughly because within that document you may find other pieces of information that could be valuable in this case you may find the name of a patent attorney who drafted this you may find addresses of parties associated with this if you're looking for assets these can all be valuable details that may help you find other assets continuity data maybe there was a provisional patent filed prior before this you may find other technical resources that can identify different assets or different relationships.

Don't just start with that one patent document and call it a day get them all and see if there's any relationships also look for the patents on either side of this one for example this is a patent number 20221376 pull up three seven five and three seven seven because you may find that the same inventor or the same firm filed for patents on either side of it and that could help you.

Take a look at trademarks the trademark search process is essentially similar again it's through uspto.gov their system is called tess trademark electronic search systems you can make it very complicated free form or basic we like to start with the basic so you can type in any type of words so we typed in the words yes hello and it has three uh results from hello to yes and it tells you who the registrant is attorney of record that's an important thing because even though aprio llp is the owner of this registrant alex j aaron is the attorney that filed it that may help you because you can then look for records for alex j erin even in civil court in that jurisdiction even corporations to see are there any other types of recordings or filings even not patents that may be real estate filings maybe bank account filings by that attorney.

Now you have aprio llp you can search for that in the secretary of state it also tells you what type of business it is business management consulting services in the field of behavioral economics might help you find other holdings or activities of that corporation in this example we typed in the word ajax as you can see ajax is a common term and there's all kinds of ajax names now if you look there's a column for live dead these are ones which have been expired never were approved the ones that are live are current so if you're looking for an ajax company you're going to find that there are 167 for this particular term you may want to narrow it down maybe you want to start with just all of them and look at each one of them.

What is this one this one is a logo the design custom manufacturer plastic components well now you have the owner is a corporation in california with an address you have an attorney of record you have the date that it was filed and you have what type of business this company is in all that information can lead you to other potential activities or assets if you know their custom manufacturer plastic components for capital equipment maybe there's a trade organization in that industry that you can find competitors and if you call up a competitor even as a prospective client you can say look have you ever heard of ajax what do they do and they'll tell you a competitor will tell you all about other firms that they maybe are not so loyal to.

You have an address here you can look at who's the owner of this property you can look at is there at least on that property are there ucc filings so just finding this is a valuable resource let's take a look at another oh you can also export it by the way export it into csv file this one's live this is a different ajax manual handbrake for railroad freight cars relatively recent 2014. registrant is westinghouse air brake they have an attorney they have an address air brake avenue so this is their actual address right if they're on air brake avenue and they're in the business of hand brakes that's not just a mail drop or a corporate virtual address that's their actual address and you can find out maybe who owns that.

So searching for patents and trademarks is a great first step there are thousands and thousands of results for some of these searches you may have to sort through them let's take a look at a dead one see what happens here hotel ajax was abandoned relatively recent 2015. they have an attorney they have an address what happened with that maybe if you are searching for assets or activity for these parties you can find more activity that happened on around this date why would it be abandoned did they not proceed with the project did they change names.

So this is how you search it's pretty straightforward the key to it is not just pull this record and call it a day you want to go back and pull all these records and download the information and compare them compare the original company name what you also might find is this address now has this company name maybe they changed their name in the secretary of state records so you can use the data here first of all to find assets intellectual property intangible assets but also you can find other information about your debtor that could serve you well in chasing down those other rabbit holes whether it's secretary of state real estate or other types of financial assets.