Legal Status Information on INPADOC

The European Patent Office (EPO) has considerably enhanced the coverage of US legal status information in INPADOC and INPAFAM for 8.3 million US applications back to 1980, especially for the US pre-grant phase. These new content additions enable users to monitor the status of US applications and see which applications have been lapsed. Also, one of the codes can be used as an early indication of patent grant.

The new legal status information is reflecting major events in the transaction history of the US PAIR platform. Users can specifically search this information with 10 new legal status codes and refine the search with specific text information available for these codes. The new codes have been assigned to the STN legal status categories.

STN User Documentation

Last update: June 2019