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Patentcloud

A curated global patent database, Patent Search as a Boolean and bibliographic research tool, and Patent Vault as a portfolio workspace holding up to 100,000 patents with folders, projects and up to twenty collaborators would all work without the models. Semantic Prior Art runs on the vendor's own machine learning to predict relationships between a patent and potential prior art and return ranked references across six jurisdictions.

A generative AI Patent Summary condenses each reference and highlights terms that align with the claims at issue; it reached Due Diligence in June 2023, Quality Insights in October 2023 and Patent Vault in February 2024. Design Search matches design patents from an uploaded image, and Quality Insights generates prior art references automatically with a calculated claim disclosure rate. The platform is sold as six applications that can be bought separately, and several do not depend on the models. InQuartik's own framing puts high quality patent data first and analytics over it second.

Every output a user acts on is a patent document that can be opened and checked. Semantic Prior Art returns up to 300 references from six patent authorities. Quality Insights surfaces file wrappers and supports claim construction, and Prior Art Analytics compares references against the claims at issue and calculates the share of claim elements already disclosed. References are ranked by relevance and starred where semantic similarity exceeds the overall average similarity between all patents and their family members and section 102 prior art. A post about a model upgrade reports a pairing success rate for novelty prior art rising from 77 to 86 percent, with the error rate down 40 percent, and marketing claims prior art search time cut by over 50 percent.

Those figures measure an internal classification improvement on two third party portfolios rather than the accuracy of the product's output. No failure modes are named. Clause 11 disclaims liability for errors or omissions and places that risk on the client.

Clause 11 of the Terms of Use states that no legal advice is intended or offered, that the vendor disclaims all liability for any decision taken in reliance on the content, and that the client assumes the risk of possible errors or omissions. That allocates responsibility and says nothing about how the system is supervised. No published material describes what the system does unaided, what constrains it, what review surface a professional works through, or how an output returns to human judgment, and no mode or setting is documented.

The starred relevance threshold on Semantic Prior Art tells a reviewer which references exceed average semantic similarity, a single indicator a professional can act on. The platform retrieves, ranks and summarizes patent documents for a professional to assess rather than drafting or acting on a matter.

A post about a model upgrade reports the pairing success rate for novelty prior art on an Nvidia portfolio rising from 77 to 86 percent, with a 40 percent cut in the error rate, and works through a second example on a Masimo portfolio. Marketing claims prior art search time cut by over 50 percent. Those examples name the portfolios analyzed, not customers who deployed the product, so they show the tool working on public patent data rather than use by a buyer.

The About page adds more than 440,000 patents handled over 35 years, which describes leadership experience rather than deployment. No named customer, case study or attributed testimonial appears in InQuartik's blog or About page, or in coverage of the company.

Section 9 of the Terms of Use binds both parties to hold confidential the contents, terms and all information related to the Agreement for ten years after termination. That protects the deal, not the client's matter material. Nothing in the Terms commits InQuartik to hold in confidence the searches a client runs, the portfolios it assembles, the notes it takes or the reports it generates. Elsewhere the vendor publishes a security posture, not a confidentiality commitment.

Three clauses concern the client's search activity, which for a patent professional can itself be privileged work product. Clause 3.2 records that the vendor collects the client's searches, browsing history, notes and other platform activity, clause 3.11 adds the terms, phrases and choices made while searching, and clause 3.4 reserves the right to analyze and compile statistics from that information to improve services and develop new ones.

Privilege and work product are not addressed. No position is stated on what any model provider may retain, none being named.

Clause 11 of the Terms of Use, the customer agreement, states that no legal advice is intended or offered by InQuartik in making any of the content available, and that the vendor disclaims all liability for any decision taken by any party in reliance on the content. The surrounding sentence adds that the client assumes the risk of possible errors or omissions, so the allocation is explicit. The vendor names IP professionals, attorneys, patent counsel, brokers and analysts as its audience, and clause 5.5 contemplates institutional subscriptions for law firms, corporations and government entities, so this is a professional tool sold to professionals rather than a consumer product.

Nothing addresses how the product supports a practitioner's competence or supervision duties, and no jurisdiction limit is named, despite a database spanning six patent jurisdictions and validity analysis built for US patents.

No governance position is published for a system whose output informs patent validity and freedom to operate decisions. Nothing identifies who inside the vendor is accountable for the models, no testing regime before release is described as governance, no policy or principles statement exists, and no certification such as ISO 42001 is claimed. Nothing addresses uneven output across jurisdictions, technology fields, filing languages or portfolio sizes, which is where bias would matter on a patent analytics product.

A post about a model upgrade does publish a before and after evaluation of classification performance on two named portfolios. That is measurement, not a governance framework, an accountability structure or a testing regime that could be audited. The ISO 27001 certification covers information security management.

Clause 3.7 lets the client request export, update, correction or deletion of personal information and require the vendor to stop collecting, processing and using it, with a commitment to comply in a timely manner. Clause 3.8 commits to systematic deletion of identity documents once identity is confirmed. Clause 3.5 requires third party processors to comply with data protection regulation, and clause 3.6 acknowledges transfer across borders with security safeguards.

Access control and infrastructure protection sit inside the ISO 27001 scope. No retention period is stated for searches, notes, projects or generated reports, and clause 3.1 says instead that the vendor may at all times receive and store such information. Nothing describes what happens to a client's Patent Vault projects on termination; clause 9.4 covers return or destruction of confidential information, which section 9 defines as the agreement's own terms.

No subprocessor is named, clause 3.5 referring only to trusted third party processors and service providers. No incident or breach notification practice is published.

Clause 11 disclaims liability for errors or omissions throughout the services, states that the client assumes that risk as a subscriber, and disclaims all liability for any decision taken by any party in reliance on the content. Clause 15 is the only indemnification article. It obliges the client to indemnify, defend and hold harmless InQuartik under five heads, including breach, third party IP claims arising from client submissions, and the client's activities in connection with the database and reports.

There is no vendor indemnity of any kind. The warranties at clause 10.1 are corporate rather than performance warranties: that the services contain no libelous matter, that the vendor operates lawfully and holds necessary permits, and that it has capacity to contract. Nothing warrants the accuracy, completeness or fitness of the analysis, and no insurance is referenced. Section 12 is headed Limitation of Liability, Cap and Force Majeure.

No integration into practice systems is published, and the vendor's own position is that none is needed. The bundle FAQ states that the plans let a team work on the Patentcloud platform without introducing additional third party tools, a claim that the platform stands alone rather than a claim of interoperability. No docketing system, document management system, IP management platform or patent office filing interface is named as a connection, no API is documented or referenced, and no integrations page is listed.

Export and sharing exist inside the platform's own boundary. PatentMatrix dashboards and Due Diligence and Quality Insights reports can be shared with colleagues and partners, and the KEEP function saves findings into a Patent Vault project for team members. Those move work between the vendor's own applications and users, not into the systems a firm already runs.

The platform runs on a hybrid cloud infrastructure in named locations: Amazon Web Services data centers in Oregon and Tokyo and Taiwan Mobile data centers in Taipei. The vendor states the AWS facilities are certified to ISO 27001, PCI DSS Service Provider Level 1 and SOC 2, and that the Taipei facilities carry Tier III certification in design, facility and operations. Physical and environmental security sits inside the ISO 27001 scope.

No tenancy model is stated, so whether the deployment is single tenant or multi tenant and how customers are separated is not known. Processing location is not distinguished from storage location, and which site runs the analysis is not stated. No region choice is offered. The geography is the vendor's architecture rather than a customer election, and clause 3.6 confirms that information collected in one jurisdiction may be moved to servers in another under unspecified safeguards.

InQuartik's Trust and Security page states that InQuartik is ISO 27001 certified and sets out the scope: all six Patentcloud applications listed individually, Quality Insights, Due Diligence, SEP OmniLytics, Patent Search, Design Search and Patent Vault, together with internal systems covering development, maintenance, physical security, and the management of application systems, data protection systems and network communications.

The certificate is offered for direct download rather than through an account executive or an NDA. The page also names the hosting estate and the certifications those facilities hold. The latest certification announcement is a renewal in the second year rather than a confirmation for the current year. No SOC 2 report of the vendor's own is claimed; the SOC 2 reference belongs to AWS and its infrastructure.

Semantic Prior Art is described as powered by Patentcloud's machine learning technology, a claim of ownership rather than an identification. The Patent Summary feature is described as generative AI without naming a model, a provider or an architecture, and a model upgrade is discussed in terms of classification performance without saying what was upgraded. No foundation model or model provider is named anywhere, and nothing states whether the generative component, which sends patent text to a model, is built in house or supplied by a third party.

The Terms of Use are silent on the point. Amazon Web Services and Taiwan Mobile are named, but as infrastructure: naming a cloud host says where a model runs, not whose model it is. The vendor does disclose that machine learning and generative AI sit behind named features. Nothing is named that a change notice could cover.

Five bundle plans are named: Premium, Patent Due Diligence, Patent Portfolio Analysis, Patent Litigation and Freedom to Operate, each built around a stated patent scenario with a feature comparison table showing what it includes and excludes. Separate pricing pages exist for the individual products. The unit of charge is one account per plan, with additional seats on request. Entitlements are quantified: storage for 100,000 patents, up to 1,000 customizable folders and up to twenty collaborators.

The bundle discount is stated as up to 79 percent against standalone subscription. Billing is monthly or annual, charged automatically to a credit card at the start of each cycle, and plan changes and cancellations take effect from the next cycle. Free trials include seven day trials and two free validity analysis reports. Custom bundles and additional seats go through a sales conversation. Plan figures are displayed in the comparison tables on the pricing pages.

The buyer segments are named individually: IP professionals, attorneys, dealers, brokers, scientists, engineers, financiers and designers, and clause 5.5 of the Terms contemplates institutional subscriptions for law firms, corporations and business, charitable or government entities. The five bundle plans are named practice scenarios, each mapped to the work it supports: due diligence before buying or licensing, portfolio analysis at any scale, litigation response by finding weaknesses in the patent at issue, freedom to operate by clearing products in target markets, and an enterprise plan covering every scenario.

A dedicated application serves standard essential patent work, naming 5G and 6G claim charting and FRAND issues, and another serves design patent clearance. US, European, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and WIPO documents are named as the semantic prior art scope. The limits are not stated. Nothing says which jurisdictions fall outside coverage, and the validity and file wrapper analysis in Quality Insights is described for US patents without saying what is unavailable elsewhere.