In 2020, Unified Patents launched several strategic relationships with prior art vendors to increase the quality of the submissions for PATROLL. These vendors, Apex Standards, Techson IP, Amplified, Traindex, InQuartik, IPscreener, and now Google, have led to not only more submissions but high-quality prior art being announced against NPEs on a monthly basis.
In 2018, there were 337 total submissions for various PATROLL contests. In 2019, that number dropped to 282. However, in 2020 that number climbed back up by nearly 40% to 389 submissions.
The increase in submissions allowed for more winners to be identified. While 2018 and 2019 saw only 11 and 18 announcements, 2020 had 24. This was a 50% increase from 2019. With 20 active contests and a new prior art tool that Unified has launched, that number is expected to be even higher.
Interestingly, the addition of using the various vendors led to 282 unique submissions last year. This would account for nearly 73% of all submissions last year. Of these 282 submissions, 40 were identified as winning submissions. It should be noted that many times, multiple submissions are used for a contest winner.
Of these 40 submissions, nearly half of them came from one or several of the prior art reports provided by the various vendors. By establishing these relationships with the vendors, it aided our searchers in finding high-quality art to defeat low-quality patents. PATROLL is just one of many tools that Unified provides in helping to improve patent quality.