Dr. Richard G. Cooper

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Providing Expert Witness Services in Software, Internet and Electronics Technologies Create Support Claim Charts Supporting claim charts help you identify any indefinite terms in your patent.  Finding indefinite terms is important because: During prosecution, you want to be sure that every claim element is represented in the specifications.  If any element isn't represented, that claim will be called Indefinite by the USPTO examiner and a violation of paragraph 112.  During litigation, you want to know any weaknesses in the patents in suit.  So you need a tool that can help you identify indefinite terms, and the claim chart has traditionally been the mdethod of choice.  Given a patent you wish to examine, you can automatically generate a support chart for the Selected Claim by pressing the Create Support Chart button.  After generating the support chart, you can choose to automatically generate the full three column traditional claim chart by checking the Challenge Claim box.  The figure below shows the proper buttons to use when generating the support chart.  After pressing the Create Support Chart button, you will see a Chart panel and Chart tab as shown in the figure below: At the bottom left, there is a listbox containing the leftmost text of each claim element.  By left clicking on any one of the claim elements in the listbox, you can see the claim element text in the center left panel and the supporting text from the patent in the center panel.  In this example, the support patent is numbered 4953080 as shown in the legend above the center panel.  That results from having pressed the Create Support Chart button while patent 4953080 was being displayed in the Claim panel, and claim 1 was the Selected Claim.   Notice that the Challenge Claims box is checked in the figure above, as shown in the red ellipse.  After creating the support chart, any patent that is loaded using the Load Patent File button, or selected using the drop down list, will provide more information.  The new patent will be analyzed as the challenging patent in the third column of the claim chart.  The figure below shows how patent 5175848 was used to provide the third column to challenge patent 4953080’s claim 1: The claim chart is fully supported during Scan All operations.  If you are looking at a list of patents, you can scan each one, and see the claim chart change to fit each specification.  The figure below shows how each patent is presented in the Chart panel during Scan All displays: Each time the Next button is pressed on the left side panel, another patent is loaded and the claim chart’s third column is filled in using the material from the next patent being scanned.   For more information on the Scan All function, please visit the Scan All page.  To save a claim chart in a Word-compatible HTM file, use the File | Save Claim Chart .. menu item to choose a folder and file name for saving an HTM file.  The figure below shows this selection: The file will be saved with an *.HTM extension.  You can then open that file with Microsoft Word, edit it, add comments, headers, footers, or other text, and save it as a word document.  To do so, open a Windows Explorer to the folder containing the *.HTM file.  Left click once on the file to select it.  Then right click on the file to bring up Windows menu containing the selection open with, and choose Microsoft Office Word from the list of programs that can be used to open the file.  You can use Word to add images, delete excess match items, and otherwise make the claim chart presentable to your satisfaction.  If desired, you can use Word to save the file with a *.doc extension to make the document more obviously readable.  Search this web site:

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