Interview with Casey Chan, co-founder and CEO of WizPatent

We are honoured to have Casey Chan, an orthopedic surgeon and adjunct professor from NUS, to share with us about his journey as an entrepreneur and his latest company, WizPatent.

SGE: How did this venture begin? What made you start WizPatent?

Casey: Wade Fallin, co-founder of WizPatent, and I have been in product development for the past 15 years. As such, we are aware that the early stages of any product development project requires the need to conduct patent due diligence. This involves searching through patents, downloading patents, organizing patents and managing patents. Organizing and sorting patents is vital for the efficacious review of patents in an efficient manner, so that one could make quick decisions for the Freedom to Operate.

The process of determining Freedom to Operate has to be done manually as currently there are no tools or software in the market to automate this task. Having filed a number of patents ourselves, we are very familiar with patent due diligence. Hence, we had an extremely good concept of what we wanted from a productivity software program. With the software as our main product, we set up WizPatent Pte Ltd.

SGE: As we understand, your product is created as a solution to the problem that people encountered during patent due diligence. Can you elaborate more on the problems that you have encountered during patent due diligence?

Casey: Patent documents are public documents where Patent Offices such as the United States of Patent and Trademark Office (UPSTO) and European Patent Office (EPO) provide them as a service to the public. It may be easy to search and download large number of patents using the search engines from these Patent Offices but one of the drawbacks is the review of these large numbers of patents and obtaining all of the patents relevant to your current work.

Another problem is the process of determining Freedom to Operate, as this cannot be automated because one has to personally review the claims and interpret the scope of these claims.

SGE: How was the developmental process for your product, WizPatent Manager?

Casey: Having done many patent due diligence, we have a developed best practice process to efficiently complete tasks in a timely and reliable fashion. We felt that this process can be done more efficiently if we could develop a productivity tool to speed up the process. Having founded a previous software company, we embarked on this project using the lessons that I have learned from my previous venture.

We felt that the architecture of the software is the key to the development of a successful and robust product. Wade and I spent one and a half years conceptualizing and refining the architecture of the software before a single line of code was written. We also developed a user interface mock-up and user specifications in detail prior to the start of coding.

In addition, we have been involved in the development of medical devices for the past 15 years. One of the key aspects in this is the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in product development to ensure a robust and reliable end-product. As opposed to other software companies, we used the medical device development protocol and applied it to our software development.

SGE: That is interesting, so what are the most important features of your product that distinguishes itself from your competitors?

Casey: We believe that we have a superior search interface that will allow the user to search from both USPTO and Espacenet as both use a common interface. The search rules were studied intensively in both USPTO and Espacenet and these search rules were incorporated into Bubble Help and Error Traps.

If you entered a query using the search engines of USPTO or Espacenet, you would not know if your query was right until it was sent out. In WizPatent Manager, we have included Bubble Help entries for each field, citing examples of valid and invalid search entries.