How RPX uses IPRally to provide stronger patent risk management for their membership base

Supporting the patent quality initiative

RPX Corporation, a leader in patent risk mitigation, was founded in 2008 with the primary objective of making the patent licensing ecosystem more rational and efficient. The company's core defensive acquisition model reduces members' exposure to litigation-based licensing.

Starting in 2013, RPX created a complementary service, the Patent Quality Initiative, designed to both enhance efficiency and increase public confidence in the patent system by deterring sub-standard patent assertions and invalidating low-quality patents.

Within this service, RPX's patent analysts conduct extensive prior art and invalidity searches, leveraging a deep team of subject matter experts with broad technical and patent expertise, along with RPX's comprehensive database of patent intelligence. RPX's in-house analysts develop search strategies, conduct searches, and review search results, occasionally engaging third-party subject matter experts and search firms where warranted. To maintain a high level of quality in its searches, RPX’s patent analysts rely on industry-leading search tools that assist in making this process more thorough and efficient.

In 2021, RPX started using IPRally to empower its patent analysts with a next-generation, native AI tool designed for deep and efficient searches. Because RPX regularly conducts a high volume of prior art searches, RPX was able to systematically measure IPRally’s effectiveness in two dimensions.

Increased impact in IPR challenges, more efficiently

RPX's patent analysts have integrated IPRally into their workflow for prior art and invalidity research. This integration supports RPX's mission to reduce litigation risks and costs by providing timely and accurate search results to its members. The shared search results help members avoid redundant efforts and expenses, promoting a collaborative approach to patent risk management.

“Given RPX's commitment to maintaining high quality standards, continuously evaluating processes and tools is imperative,” notes Naseem Nazemi who is Counsel at RPX and manages RPX’s prior art search program, and highlights the impact on multiple levels: "IPRally has enabled our patent analysis team to work much more effectively and efficiently. One way we indirectly measure the effectiveness of our searches is to note when RPX-surfaced prior art is used in petitions for inter partes review by third parties. This indicates the high quality of art found by RPX patent analysts. In comparing similar-length time periods before and after we started utilizing IPRally, the percentage of RPX-surfaced prior art appearing in IPR petitions has increased from 30% to 42%. When you factor in the efficiency gains – that our average time per patent for finding that prior art had decreased by 1.5 hours – the results are actually quite amazing."

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From internal tool to integrated platform collaborator

Following RPX’s evaluation of the increased effectiveness and efficiency in prior art and validity searches conducted by RPX's Patent Analysis team, IPRally became an RPX-vetted and trusted vendor. IPRally now works in close collaboration with RPX's patent intelligence product, Empower, becoming only the second vendor whose software is integrated with Empower as RPX drives forward its strategy of bringing Empower-as-a-platform to the market: a central hub of intelligence and workflows for companies involved in the business of patents and patent risk mitigation.

For RPX's Patent Analysis team and for subscribers of both IPRally and RPX Empower, this provides the same productivity gains described in this case study – now without the hassle of context-switching between the vital intelligence that RPX Empower provides and the native AI capabilities that IPRally excels at.

The integration focuses on two key workflows:

Invalidity Search: Users working with patent litigation data in RPX Empower can seamlessly transition to IPRally to launch targeted prior art searches, identifying novelty-destroying references for asserted patents and strengthening defensive strategies.

State-of-the-Art Analysis: Clients can leverage IPRally's semantic understanding and knowledge graph technology to conduct comprehensive technology landscape assessments and freedom-to-operate analyses, all while maintaining context from their work in Empower.

Why IPRally?

RPX's approach to technology collaborations is distinguished by internal validation. Solutions must first prove themselves with RPX's own team of patent experts and analysts, demonstrating reliability and effectiveness on real-world patent use cases. IPRally met this rigorous standard, showing measurable improvements in both search efficiency and result quality.

IPRally's graph neural network approach, trained on millions of patent examiner citations, goes beyond traditional keyword searches to understand the technical relationships between patent concepts. The platform's explainable AI provides users with visual knowledge graphs and highlighted relevant passages, enabling faster and more confident decision-making – critical factors that contributed to the productivity gains RPX experienced.

"We only work with vendors whose technology our own experts trust and use in their daily work," says Steve Chiang, Chief SaaS Officer at RPX. "IPRally proved their value with our internal team first. That's what qualified them for integration into Empower."

Join our live session     

Join both the RPX and IPRally teams in our live session on 25th June where we’ll be sharing how our new integration will enable IP teams to combine world-class patent data, analytics and litigation intelligence with proprietary AI search, agents, analyst tools and AI classification to solve real patent challenges.

Register here.

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