Prior-Art & Invalidity Search · Patent & IP Firms

Find the art.
Or prove it isn’t there.

I examined patent applications at the USPTO before I spent five years searching against them. That is the product: art an examiner would have cited, found by someone who used to cite it.

Delivered chart-ready with the search record attached — every query, every class, every database — so a negative result is evidence rather than a shrug.

Invalidity & prior-art search → AI engineering & custom tooling
9
apps shipped
2
monetized via Stripe
5 yrs
patent/IP work
8 yrs
DoD mechanical engineering

Trained & billed inside teams at

  • USPTO
    Examiner
  • NSWC
    DoD · 8 yrs
  • Ensemble IP
    Patent Engineer
  • Concept IP
    Analyst
  • Dominion Harbor
    Analyst

Who this is for

Patent boutiques (5–50 attorneys)

Losing senior hours to manual prior-art and office-action review.

Corporate IP departments

In-house analysts are the bottleneck on FTO and landscape work.

Patent search agencies

Trying to scale without linearly scaling headcount.

Examiner Search is not a fit for pure advisory engagements, PowerPoint-only deliverables, or work that needs to live on someone else's OpenAI key.

Two ways to work together

Invalidity & prior-art search

For litigation and IPR. References located, dated, and mapped element-by-element to the asserted claims. Classification-anchored search across patents, foreign art, and non-patent literature — every reference read in the original before it reaches a chart.

Start with a no-cost preliminary screen →

Office-action second opinion

For prosecution. What the cited art actually teaches, one limitation at a time, with column and line cites — and a scope check before an amendment makes the estoppel permanent. Fixed fee, quoted before the work starts.

See the office-action services →

Why Examiner Search

Most AI consultants have never worked inside a patent firm.
The ones who have can't ship software.
Examiner Search is both.

  • › USPTO Patent Examiner (2016–2017, internal combustion engines art unit) — examined prior art from the inside
  • › Patent Engineer at Ensemble IP — billed daily for FTO, patentability, landscape, and invention-disclosure work; prior analyst roles at Dominion Harbor and Concept IP
  • › Mechanical Engineer, NSWC — 8 years at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Department of Defense
  • › Lapsed Secret clearance — pre-vetted status available for defense-adjacent work with sponsor
  • › 9 shipped apps — 6 Chrome extensions (5 live on the Chrome Web Store, including AI Patent Search Generator) plus a web SaaS and 2 desktop apps
  • › B.S. Mechanical Engineering, University of Oklahoma · Software Development Certificate, Coding Dojo

How we work

No decks. No drifting timelines. No "we'll get back to you."

The search record is part of the report.
Every query, every classification, every database, with dates and hit counts. It is what turns "we found nothing" from an assertion into something you can check — and it is what a deposition would ask for.
Every reference read in the original.
Nothing reaches a chart on the strength of an abstract or a search snippet. Quotes carry column and line cites, and the cite is checked against the fetched text rather than trusted.
An honest no.
If the art is not there, the report says so and says how hard it looked. A weak reference dressed up as a find costs you more than a clean negative, and you would find out at the worst possible moment.
Weekly written status + async Loom.
Friday status report (one page, 60-second read), mid-week video update, 30-minute live sync. Written artifacts live in your retention system.
Milestone invoicing.
Every SOW is broken into 3–5 milestones, each with written acceptance criteria. You approve each one before the next starts.

Trust & compliance

  • Mutual NDAs — signed before any confidential material changes hands
  • DPA-ready — no-training clauses for LLM vendors; retention windows explicit
  • UPL-aware — analyst-support framing; SOW language reviewed by IP-qualified counsel
  • USPTO-credentialed — former examiner; understands what "trade secret" means in a patent context

The preliminary screen costs nothing and takes one email.

Send a patent number and the posture of the case. You get back the classes I searched, the closest art I found, and an honest read on whether it is worth going further.

Get a free screen →