Interplay of usability and requirements engineering in facts analysis for patent disputes

Patent law still relies on textual argumentation when determining inventiveness, i.e. (non)obviousness, of inventions over prior state-of-the-art, i.e. published knowledge, in patent disputes. The objective of this research is to support an industrial partner to identify usability issues supporting requirements engineering when introducing the Facts Screening and Transforming Processor (FSTP), a systematic, structured method and software for analyzing and representing facts indicating the (non)obviousness of an invention. Different qualitative research methods are used to elicit and analyze usability issues. This paper describes first attempts on how acceptance of the FSTP method and software may be enhanced by a user-centered approach comprising: identifying learnability issues of the method, creating training accordingly, and uncovering usability issues of the existing prototype. The analysis of facts for a dispute is a creative and lengthy process that requires a lot of different skills (also with respect to regional specificities in patent law). The data collected represents a small sample of users with different background knowledge (i.e. (patent) lawyers) and cases of different patent law systems (i.e. USA and Europe).