Patent search FAQ: straight answers, limits included

No. Metadragons LLC is not a law firm and is not registered to practice before the USPTO. We provide technical, analytical, commercial, and administrative services. We don’t give legal advice or legal opinions, we don’t prepare, file, or prosecute applications, and we don’t draft or negotiate agreements. The full list is on our scope and disclosures page.

Your registered patent attorney or agent. Our reports are written for them to review and rely on. We coordinate with your independent registered practitioner, and if you don’t have one, we can share a list of independent practitioners to contact. We receive no referral fees.

Independent inventors, startups and grant applicants, university and lab technology-transfer offices, investors and lenders, corporate IP and R&D teams, and patent practitioners who outsource searches and drawings. Each group has its own page under Solutions.

We are based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and serve clients across the US. Our hours are Monday–Friday, 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. Mountain Time. The contact page has our phone, e-mail, and address.

No. They are illustrative composites drawn from typical engagement patterns, with details changed and no real client depicted. We explain why on the engagement profiles page.

Decisions about direction: where to put R&D, which market to enter, who the real competitors are, and what to say in a grant proposal or investor deck. A landscape maps who files what, where, and when, and frames whitespace as hypotheses to test, not conclusions.

Hoard is our analyst-operated patent intelligence workspace. Watch handles monitoring with analyst-written digests, Atlas holds interactive landscapes, and Ledger tracks portfolio records, public status, and fee windows. Read the platform overview.

Access is by invitation, and every workspace is set up by an analyst. Hoard comes with relevant engagements, or as a standalone subscription quoted to your scope. Ask us for a walkthrough.

No. Essentiality is a technical and legal question, and we give no essentiality opinions. Our Standards & SEP Mapping maps declared patents against standard sections with technical concordance, for review by your counsel.

We answer that with a commercial estimate: a range built from cost, market, and income approaches, with every assumption stated. It is a business-planning estimate, not a fairness opinion, tax appraisal, or investment advice. See Commercial Patent Valuation.

No, and no one honestly can. Sale-readiness typically takes 3–4 weeks, and marketing campaigns typically run 3–9 months with no guarantee of a sale. If the commercial evidence is weak, we tell you plainly before you spend on marketing. See Sell Your Patent.

Sale-readiness work is quoted as a fixed fee. Brokerage success-fee terms are written down and agreed before any marketing starts. Nothing is billed that wasn’t quoted or agreed in writing.

Your counsel. We coordinate the transaction, including the buyer universe, introductions, and the data room, but we don’t draft, review, or negotiate agreements.

That is your decision, and it is often the central trade-off. Paying keeps the patent alive and saleable; lapsing saves the fee but ends the asset. Our maintenance-fee calculator shows the windows, and Portfolio Pruning Analytics weighs them across a portfolio.