STN Coffee Lecture: LSC2 vs. LSEC – Legal Event Categories in the INPADOC databases

Legal Status event searching can be a challenging process, since legal events from different jurisdictions are given a number of different labels, so comprehensive searching requires retrieving data from all relevant events.  For many years, FIZ Karlsruhe’s editorial team has reviewed more than 4200 international legal status codes and assigned each code to a Legal Status Category, indexed in the field /LSC2.  Based on the WIPO standard ST.27, the EPO has introduced another classification scheme for INPADOC legal events since 2000. These new categories are indexed in the /LSEC field.

These two categories of legal status events in INPADOC have a different focus, and both can be used in complementary ways to increase search efficiency and return of relevant results.  This brief session will cover the differences between these two fields so that searchers can use both with confidence.

Presentation