New York, NY, Jan. 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LexisNexis® Legal & Professional today announced the ‘Cellular Verified’ initiative, a first-of-its-kind collaboration with over 30 of the top 5G patent- holding companies to rigorously improve the accuracy of patent declaration data. Through a year-long collaboration with the industry’s leading telecommunications companies, LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions was able to achieve 99.9% data accuracy by matching, cleaning, enhancing, and verifying its database of patent families with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) declaration database.
“Patent declaration data is inherently inconsistent, shaped by each company’s unique declaration practices. If such self-declarations are not rigorously cleaned and verified, the data favors companies that provide more detailed and cleaner information, resulting in a systematic bias. This creates significant challenges for the industry, from licensing negotiations to FRAND rate determinations,” said Tim Pohlmann, Managing Director Americas and Director of SEP Analytics for LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions. “Cellular Verified directly addresses these challenges by delivering clean, standardized, and validated patent declaration data, ensuring stakeholders can rely on a trusted and impartial source for critical decisions. This collaboration underscores our, but also the industry’s commitment to delivering the most reliable and comprehensive patent declaration data."
"Our industry has long faced challenges with gaps, redundancies, and errors in patent declaration data, which can lead to inefficiencies in licensing and disputes," said Alan Fan, Vice President and Head of IPR Department at Huawei. "Our collaborative work with LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions on the Cellular Verified initiative has significantly strengthened the accuracy of patent declaration data for all stakeholders. This initiative provides clarity to the market and enables us to focus on innovation and strategic growth with greater confidence. It’s a testament to the power of industry partnerships in driving meaningful progress and innovation forward."
Data Challenges Around Patent Declarations
Hosting the world’s leading source of patent declarations essential to standard technologies like 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G, including over 555,000 declared patents across 100,000 patent families, ETSI plays a pivotal role in the telecommunications market by setting standards that ensure interoperability and compatibility among devices and networks.
In response to some court rulings that prohibit the enforcement of late-declared patents, many ETSI-declaring companies now self-declare patents at the earliest possible stage, frequently including unpublished provisional or priority numbers. The self-declaration process introduces significant variability, as companies follow different approaches when declaring their patents. Companies often submit patent numbers in varying formats and types. Some provide only provisional numbers, while others declare application numbers, grant numbers, and all jurisdictional counterparts.
This lack of consistency results in an ambiguous ETSI database, complicating analysis and interpretation. Top-down analysis of 4G or 5G patent owners can become biased, underrepresenting the patent portfolio size of companies that share less information while favoring those that declare more extensively, leading to inaccurate analyses and conflicting reports on 4G and 5G patent ownership.
Because of those data issues, 40% of self-declared patents cannot be directly matched to normalized and cleaned patent information, while roughly 20% of matched numbers result in false positives due to the ambiguity of patent numbers.
The Cellular Verified Initiative: A Collaborative Solution
The Cellular Verified initiative was undertaken to address those challenges around patent data accuracy and ensure companies could be confident in the integrity and reliability of patent data used in patent licensing negotiations, commercialization, and patent pool formation.
Collaborating with over 30 top ETSI-declaring companies, LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions has established a new standard for data accuracy through the Cellular Verified process.
- Matching and Cleaning Data: Standardizing patent numbers across formats to achieve 99.9% accuracy through advanced matching algorithms and company feedback.
- Expanding Family Coverage: Identifying missing patent family counterparts to ensure a complete global view of declared patents.
- Classifying Patents by Standard Generation: Cross-referencing patents with ETSI datasets to accurately classify them by technology generation (e.g., 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G).
- Enhancing Ownership Data: Updating legal status and harmonizing ownership records using corporate tree data to reflect acquisitions and reassignment.
This chart shows the success of LexisNexis matching and cleaning efforts, as the average matching rate improved from t1 (initial matching efforts) to t7 (advanced application of matching processes) to Cellular Verified (final verified matching with feedback from declaring companies).
Through rigorous validation processes and ongoing input from ETSI-declaring companies, Cellular Verified provides a clean, unbiased database of declared patents, including weekly data updates to ensure the data remains current.
The Cellular Verified initiative not only enhances the accuracy of patent data but also provides a robust foundation for stakeholders to assess the value of patent portfolios, prepare for FRAND negotiations, and benchmark licensing offers against comparable agreements. As the 5G era continues to evolve, LexisNexis® IPlytics™ remains at the forefront of standard essential patent analytics solutions, delivering unparalleled insights and clarity to the world of patent ownership.
Learn more about the Cellular Verified initiative here: www.lexisnexisip.com/cellular-verified. Read the new 2025 report on the 5G patent space -- “Who Is Leading the 5G Patent Race?” -- based on Cellular Verified data from LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions here: www.lexisnexisip.com/5g-report.
About LexisNexis® Legal & Professional
LexisNexis® Legal & Professional provides legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision-making, achieve better outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,800 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.
About LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions
LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions bring clarity to innovation for businesses worldwide. We enable innovators to accomplish more by helping them make informed decisions, be more productive, comply with regulations, and ultimately achieve a competitive advantage for their business. Our broad suite of workflow and analytics solutions (LexisNexis® PatentSight+™, LexisNexis® Classification, LexisNexis® TechDiscovery, LexisNexis® IPlytics™, LexisNexis PatentOptimizer®, LexisNexis PatentAdvisor®, and LexisNexis TotalPatent One®, LexisNexis® IP DataDirect), enables companies to be more efficient and effective at bringing meaningful innovations to our world. We are proud to directly support and serve these innovators in their endeavors to better humankind.
LexisNexis | Intellectual Property Solutions
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Name: Andrew Weinstein Email: Andrew.Weinstein@LexisNexis.com Job Title: PR Consultant
