Accelerate FTO & Patent Monitoring | Derwent Patent Monitor

Freedom to operate (FTO) review and patent monitoring are time-sensitive, high-stakes workflows. The risk is simple: miss a relevant claim, and you carry exposure into production. Delay a decision, and you push launch dates or redirect engineering effort at the last minute. Common failure points include disjointed alerts, inconsistent review notes and no durable audit trail.

That’s why we built Derwent Patent Monitor — a new software solution designed to eliminate these gaps.

In this blog, you’ll learn how this new solution simplifies FTO review and ongoing monitoring, why this matters for risk management and innovation speed and how it works in practice. We’ll also share real-world use cases so you can see the impact on decision-making and collaboration.

If you want to explore the principles behind modern patent review workflows, check out our recent blog: Why patent review needs a modern workspace.

Why traditional patent monitoring workflows fall short

Most FTO reviews and patent monitoring workflows still rely on manual coordination — alerts routed by email, spreadsheets for tracking and disconnected storage for documents. These methods introduce three critical weaknesses:

Fragmented visibility: When alerts and annotations live in separate systems, reviewers lose context. A claim flagged by an engineer may never reach the attorney responsible for risk assessment.
No prioritization: Traditional tools treat all documents equally. Analysts spend hours triaging hundreds of patents manually, with no structured way to surface the most relevant threats first.
Limited auditability: Decisions often lack a durable record. When a question arises months later, why a claim was cleared or flagged, teams scramble to reconstruct the rationale from scattered notes.

Patent litigation is a global risk with a steep price tag. From the United States to Europe and Asia, organizations spend millions each year defending infringement claims. A single missed threat in an FTO review can trigger injunctions, costly redesigns and reputational damage that far outweigh the cost of prevention.

Introducing Derwent Patent Monitor

Derwent Patent Monitor is purpose-built for FTO review and patent monitoring. It replaces fragmented workflows with a structured environment designed for multi-stakeholder collaboration. Unlike generic search platforms or bolt-on monitoring features, Derwent Patent Monitor was engineered to address the specific pain points that slow workflows and increase risk.

Here’s how each capability solves those challenges:

AI-powered threat analysis: Instead of treating every document equally, the platform prioritizes patents that pose the highest risk. This reduces first-pass review time and ensures technical reviewers focus where it matters most.
Project-based workflow: Reviews are organized by project, with role-based feeds, document assignments and full activity history. This structure eliminates duplication and provides a clear audit trail for compliance and defensibility.
Connected ecosystem: Native integration with Derwent Innovation and Innography means alerts and enriched Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) data flow directly into your workspace. No manual transfers, piles of PDFs, or lost context; just a continuous pipeline from search to review.

Together, these capabilities create a workflow that accelerates decisions, minimizes false negatives and provides transparency across every stage of FTO and monitoring.

How Derwent Patent Monitor works

Derwent Patent Monitor is designed to make FTO review and patent monitoring structured, transparent and efficient. Here’s how the platform addresses common workflow challenges:

Project-based organization: Each review runs as a dedicated project. You can group documents by product line, technology domain, or competitor, with folders and subfolders for granular control. Role-based feeds ensure that patent analysts, attorneys and R&D reviewers see only what’s relevant to their responsibilities.
Cross-project intelligence: Annotations and decisions carry forward across related families and projects. If a claim was cleared in one review, that insight is visible in others, reducing duplication and improving consistency.
Collaboration and traceability: Comments link directly to patent text, and every action — assignment, annotation, decision — is logged in an auditable history. This creates a defensible record for compliance and future reference.

The result: faster triage, fewer blind spots and a structured process that scales across teams.

Derwent Patent Monitor use cases

FTO review and patent monitoring workflows vary by organization, but these examples show how Derwent Patent Monitor delivers patent insights with measurable impact:

FTO review for product launch
A patent analyst conducts an FTO search in Derwent Innovation. Instead of exporting results into spreadsheets, the documents flow directly into a Derwent Patent Monitor project. AI threat analysis surfaces the patents most likely to block the launch, and explainability maps claims to product features. Attorneys and R&D reviewers annotate in context, and the Head of IP sees a consolidated risk view

Outcome: Faster go/no-go decisions with a defensible audit trail.

Opposition strategy
Monitoring competitor filings in Europe reveals a pending application that could restrict market entry. Using Derwent Patent Monitor, the IP team reviews the document collaboratively, gathers technical input, and decides whether to file an opposition before grant.

Outcome: Proactive risk mitigation and strategic use of opposition windows.

Competitor and technology monitoring
A business unit wants early visibility into filings in a new technology domain. Derwent Patent Monitor routes alerts from Derwent Innovation and Innography into a shared workspace. Reviewers tag and annotate strategically significant patents and share insights with product managers.

Outcome: Timely intelligence for R&D and business strategy, reducing surprises in development cycles.

Ready to streamline your FTO review and patent monitoring?

Fragmented workflows slow decisions and increase risk. Derwent Patent Monitor gives you a single, collaborative environment to accelerate FTO reviews and monitor competitor activity with confidence.

Start with a live project today.

Book a demo and see how to move from alerts to actionable insight in one workspace. No spreadsheets. No silos. Just faster, smarter decisions backed by DWPI data and explainable AI.

Patents