How to analyze a competitor's patent portfolio

To analyze a competitor's patent portfolio, first gather everything it owns under every name it files under. Then group the holdings by technology, read the filing trend with the publication lag corrected, and map where it seeks protection through its families. Finish with the signals of intent: pending continuations, maintenance-fee lapses and forward citations. Report the results as a share of the field, so that a slow year for everyone is not mistaken for a retreat.

Step 1: Gather the holdings

The most common error in competitor analysis happens before any counting: missing part of the portfolio. Build the list of owners first.

• Name variants. Spelling, punctuation, legal-form suffixes and transliterations. "Acme Corp", "ACME Corporation" and "Acme Corp." are one company.
• Subsidiaries. Research arms and regional entities often file in their own names. Check the corporate structure, not just the parent's name.
• Acquisitions. Patents filed by companies the competitor bought still carry the old name on their face.
• Recorded assignments. Under 35 U.S.C. § 261, an assignment is void against a later purchaser for value without notice unless it is recorded at the USPTO within three months of its date or before the later purchase. Buyers therefore have a strong reason to record, which makes the assignment records the best public view of who owns what now. They are not complete: recent transfers and transfers inside a corporate group may not be recorded yet.

Remove false positives too. Unrelated companies with similar names are common, and one of them can distort every later number. The output of this step is a name list, a document list and the documents grouped into families. Count families from here on, so an invention filed in ten countries counts once.

Step 2: Break the portfolio down by technology

Group the families two ways. Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) codes, launched jointly by the EPO and the USPTO and in use since January 2013, give a standard view that is comparable across companies. Text-based clusters show how the portfolio actually groups by subject, which often cuts across codes.

Then lay the result over your own product map. Three readings matter: where the competitor is dense, where it is thin, and where it holds families in an area you consider yours.

Step 3: Read the filing trend, net of the publication lag

Count new families by earliest priority year. Applications are generally published about 18 months after their earliest priority date (35 U.S.C. § 122(b)(1)(A) in the US), so the last two or three years of any count are incomplete. Why recent patent filing trends look like a decline works through the arithmetic.

For recent direction, look at the mix rather than the total:

• the share of each year's new families going to each technology group;
• first filings in classification codes where the company held nothing before;
• clusters where new families stopped while the company kept paying fees on the old ones.

A shift in mix shows up years before a shift in total holdings.

Step 4: Map geographic coverage through families

Where a family has members is where the company is willing to pay for protection. That usually tracks where it sells, where it manufactures and where it expects competitors to operate. Count families per office and compare patterns: a technology filed only in the US is treated differently from one filed in the US, Europe, China and Japan. A change in coverage over time, such as a technology that recently started going to more offices, is a signal of a market entry. Patent families: continuations, divisionals and CIPs explains simple and extended families and which to count.

Step 5: Watch pending continuations

Under 35 U.S.C. § 120, a continuation must be filed while an earlier application in the chain is pending, and its claims must be supported by the earlier disclosure. A family with a pending member therefore still lets the owner write new claims on that disclosure, often with products already on the market in view. Families with long chains of pending continuations show where the competitor is actively prosecuting. For freedom-to-operate work, these are the families to monitor, because their final claims do not exist yet.

Step 6: Read maintenance-fee lapses as pruning

Under 35 U.S.C. § 41(b), maintenance fees for utility patents fall due 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after grant, and a patent lapses if a fee is not paid. There is a six-month grace period with a surcharge, so confirm the status after it has passed.

A company that lets patents lapse in one technology while paying in another is showing where its priorities moved. A lapse at the first payment means the patent was given up early in its life. A single lapse can be an oversight; a pattern across a cluster usually is not.

Step 7: Use forward citations as a rough signal

Forward citations, counted from later patents by other companies, give a rough indication of influence. A few heavily cited families often hold a portfolio's foundational positions. Treat the count with care: older patents have had more time to be cited, self-citations inflate it, and citation habits differ between fields and offices. Compare families of similar age in the same field, and exclude the competitor's own citations.

Step 8: Report share of the field

Raw counts mislead in two ways. The publication lag makes every recent year look low, and a field that is cooling makes every company look like it is retreating. Share of the field corrects for both, because the competitor and the field are cut by the same delay. Hypothetical figures from an analysis run in September 2026:

Raw counts say the competitor peaked in 2023 and collapsed in 2025. Share says it has gained ground every year. The 2024 and 2025 rows are still filling in, so treat their shares as provisional, but the direction from 2021 to 2023 is on complete data. Apply the same calculation inside each technology group to see where the gains come from.

What the finished analysis should contain

• the name list used, with subsidiaries and acquisitions marked;
• families by technology group, with your own portfolio alongside;
• the filing trend by priority year, with incomplete years marked;
• coverage by office;
• pending continuations worth monitoring;
• lapses grouped by technology;
• the most cited families, excluding self-citations;
• every figure expressed as a share of the field as well as a count.

Where Competitive Intelligence fits

One Transform's Competitive Intelligence search profiles one company's patent position: its holdings broken down by technology, how its filing strategy has shifted, where the portfolio is dense or thin, and its recent investment directions. Every conclusion links to its source documents, so the checks in this method can be run against the evidence. For the field-level denominator, a Technology Landscape search on the same domain charts filing activity across all assignees.

Next step

Choose one competitor, assemble its name list using step 1, and run a Competitive Intelligence search to compare against what you find. Start at onetransform.ai.

This article is general information about patent practice, not legal advice. For advice on a specific matter, consult a registered patent attorney or agent.