Support
Have a question? Need help? These FAQs may be able to answer your questions. If not, our team is here to help.
Have a question? Need help? These FAQs may be able to answer your questions. If not, our team is here to help.
Getting Started
Before your first use, you will receive a welcome email with a link to create a password for your new account. After that you can simply login to IPToolworks and get right to work.
Check your junk folder. Our emails aren’t junk, but they have a funny way of occasionally ending up there. If you still can’t find it, contact us directly and we’ll send you a new one, pronto.
Mark Twain said you need two things to succeed in life: ignorance and confidence. We say, you need two things to use our software: a web browser and an internet connection.
Performing Searches
You begin by uploading the office action that you want to use for your search, either by dragging and dropping, or clicking to upload from a popup menu. Arguminer will automatically analyze your pdf and match it to relevant results using default search settings. You can refine results further by adjusting selections to filter by outcome (success/failure), rejection type, examiner/art unit match, date, of rejection or response, search string match, and availability of accompanying documents such as affidavits or petitions.
We highly recommend using pdfs downloaded from PAIR for best results. Variation in pdf format, especially among documents originating from scans, means that using files from other sources could increase the likelihood of encountering errors. Click here for instructions on how pdfs can be downloaded from PAIR.
If you purchased a subscription, you will be able to create accounts for multiple users at your organization (and other organizations you collaborate with), who can each perform their own searches. If you purchased a single search, results are intended for your personal use (which of course includes use on behalf of your clients).
All our data is publicly available directly from the USPTO. We do the work of indexing it, and maintain copies on our private servers. Enterprise customers may elect to work with us to create a special database of unpublished applications.
You sure can. Saved searches can be accessed from the top menu bar once you’ve logged in.
This depends on the filters you have selected, and the specific contents of the office action you uploaded. Smaller art units and more precise parameters are going to yield a smaller set of more targeted results.
Click the ? next to any item on the search page you want to learn more about to read an explanation of its function. Clicking on Tutorial in the top menu bar, once logged in, will give you a guided walk through of all of the tools.
Thank you. We are pretty excited about what our tool can do too. We call it Dynamic Applied Authority. Without giving away too much of our secret sauce, we can tell you that in addition to OCR, we use proprietary algorithms to analyze and match arguments across applications.
Our users have found Arguminer provided valuable assistance both in responding to unfamiliar rejections and finding precedents to reinforce their existing arguments. Here are some of their stories:
One user, a patent attorney who works on mechanical inventions got a rejection based on the argument that one of his client’s inventions was not significantly more than an unpatentable abstract idea. Despite his decades long experience as a patent attorney, this was not something he had seen previously. However, our software was able to analyze his rejection and automatically provide him with half-a-dozen examples of responses that had succeeded in overcoming similar rejections. Without this assistance, he would have had to essentially start from zero; educating himself on the relevant legal principles and then figuring out what arguments could be made to apply those principles to his case.
Another user knew the types of arguments which were generally made in response to a rejection she received, but didn’t know the most recent precedents which could be used in support of those arguments. After her office action was uploaded, she used Arguminer to search for responses that included the keywords “ex parte.” The results not only provided relevant precedents, but provided examples applying opinions from the patent trial and appeal board (PTAB), a source not typically used in formulating arguments because it is more difficult to access.
Troubleshooting
We strongly recommend using pdfs downloaded from PAIR to avoid this issue. While we are doing ongoing work to perfect our software’s ability to handle pdfs from multiple sources, variation in format means that files from different sources (particularly scans) have a greater chance of error. If you need a copy of your office action, you can get one from PAIR, by following directions here.
You might also want to double-check that you uploaded the correct file, in case you accidentally uploaded a document that is not an office action. If your upload still doesn’t work, click the dialogue box at the bottom of the page, or contact us directly for more assistance.
We strive for perfection, but unfortunately sometimes that doesn’t quite happen. If you do run into something unexpected while using our software, here’s what you should do:
- Click the “Report issue” button on the top right of the page to let our developers know you encountered an issue.
- If you need assistance, or are repeatedly having trouble, click the dialogue box at the bottom of the page to chat with us. You can also contact us by phone or email. We’ll do our best to help you figure out what happened and get it going right.
Payments
Our online payment portal accepts all major credit cards (and a number of minor ones); specifically, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB, Discover, and Diners Club. If you are purchasing a subscription, you can pay online, or request that we invoice you. Get in touch to discuss billing methods and payment schedule options for subscribers.
Absolutely. Our entire site is SSL encrypted and our online payments are processed by Stripe, a Level 1 PCI Service Provider. (This means they’ve achieved the most stringent level of certification available in the payments industry.)
In most cases, the answer is yes. We proudly hail from the Buckeye state, (and as it happens, Ohio is one of the states in which Saas products are considered taxable. http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/
Subscriptions
Our goal is to match our pricing to the value you are likely to receive from using our software, not to limit the number of people at your organization who would be able to use it. For that reason, subscription rates are determined based on the number of office actions you (or your organization) plan to perform searches on.
Fill the “Contact us” form. We will get in touch to schedule a demo and initial interview. This will give us a chance to learn about how we fit into your needs and you a chance to learn more about what our tool can do.
Getting in touch
We are just an email, phone call or mouse click away:
Email: info@iptoolworks.com
Phone: (574)222-6774
Or click to open the dialogue box at the bottom right of the page to chat with us directly.
When we’re not busy with our software, we love creating and sharing insights on intellectual property (ranging from the “promethean” act of tracking down innovative arguments that defeated Alice, to exploring a “myriad” of references to patents in pop culture). Check out our Youtube channel, or follow us on Twitter for the latest. Or, sign up for our mailing list and we will send you the highlights. (We promise, always 100% spam free.)
Our no. 1 goal is to be the best at making you the best (at prosecuting patents). If there is a feature you would like to see, that is not available already, you can suggest it by clicking the “Report issue (or make suggestion)” button at the top right of the page, once logged in. You can also tell us about it in an email. Write to yvonne@iptoolworks.com. (That’s a direct line to our CEO.)