Does our technology infringe another patent?

You need professional help. At that point the cost will depend on the situation and the approach you want to take. If you're familiar enough with your field of technology that you can identify your main competitors, it might be sufficient to perform a targeted freedom to operate search, i.e. one that just identifies and analyzes patents owned by a few competitors rather than a "scorch the earth" search that looks throughout the entire technology area. In my opinion, this is going to be the most efficient approach that doesn't leave you with unreasonable risks. The cost could be as little as a few thousand dollars if there aren't many patents and no problems are found. It could be much more if you need to try to invalidate one or more patents or get a written opinion to reduce your exposure.

Because every patented invention is unique, there is no software that will be able to effectively clear you from potential infringement. While a freedom to operate opinion may provide the most complete analysis to answer your question, it is often a very costly approach. A clearance search by an experienced patent professional may provide you with the information you need to understand your potential for infringement. Since every patent is unique and the number of patents that may be related to your technology is unknown, it is very difficult to predict the cost required. It would be best to contact a patent professional to discuss your situation in more detail.

Hi,

In cases where the matter is related to infringement and future litigation, please do not trust software at all. Patents professionals who draft a patent are much intelligent then software, so its not possible for software to find all relevant patents and in these cases a single patent could be fatal.

I will suggest to contact Patent professional for such searches. In our field this is generally called as FTO (FREEDOM TO OPERATE/LAUNCH). It comprises basically 2 steps: 1. search and 2. Authorisation from that country's patent attorney.

To minimize the cost you can outsource the search to a firm like Ours. We execute these type of searches for a number of Global attorneys.We charge a fix rate of $1400 for FTO search (for a single jurisdiction, in this case i suppose the jurisdiction is US) and provide you a detailed report along with legal status of patents and all.

Please feel free to contact me in case of a sample report for your review.

Regards,
Ashutosh

Sadly the case is that you probably won't know until you try to file a patent at the USPTO or the PCT.

You can do searches like described here and they will give you a general sense, but I have only seen one software tool that links products to patents via semantic search and it's not available on a one-off basis (its an annual subscription).

An FTO opinion will be very costly because it is basically the law firm's reputation that is saying that there is no way you could infringe on someone else's invention at the time of the opinion. If their opinion is incorrect, then you can sue the law firm that issued the opinion (which is why they do so much work on the file and charge so much $$$).

I do patent valuations on a regular basis for a variety of companies and the price of doing a Prior Art Search (which is what you're really talking about here) generally costs way more than the cost of my actual valuation work. I suggest you do a basic search (maybe with Ashutosh's firm), file your patents if you are so inclined and then hope for the best.

Alternatively, you could do your search and not file any patents and keep your work as trade secrets... but that's for another strategic discussion.