A Competitor Just Filed a Patent in Your Space. What To Do in the First 30 Days

Someone forwards a link. A competitor has a published application covering something that looks uncomfortably close to what your team shipped last quarter. The instinct is either to panic or to ignore it. Both are expensive.

Here is a sequence that keeps the response proportionate.

Week one: read the claims, not the title

Titles and abstracts are marketing. The claims define the boundary. A publication that sounds identical to your product often claims something narrow, and a publication that sounds unrelated sometimes claims something broad. Have someone qualified read the independent claims element by element against what you actually built.

Also check the status. A published application is not an issued patent. Claims frequently narrow during examination, sometimes substantially.

Week two: establish your own timeline

Pull your internal record. Design documents, commit history, demo recordings, customer pilots, and dated specifications all matter. Two questions follow from that record. First, were you doing this before their priority date, which may make your work relevant prior art. Second, do you have unprotected work of your own that deserves a filing now.

This is the step most teams skip, and it is the one that most often turns a defensive scramble into an offensive opportunity.

Week three: map the surrounding field

One filing is rarely the whole story. Look at the assignee's broader portfolio and the continuations they have pending. A pattern of filings tells you where they intend to go, which is usually more useful strategically than the single document that triggered the review. A structured landscape review is generally cheaper than reacting to each publication as it appears.

Week four: choose a response

• File. If your team has unprotected work in the same area, that is the clearest signal to move.
• Design around. If a claim element is genuinely implicated, an engineering change is often the lowest cost path when caught early.
• Monitor. Set a docket reminder to check prosecution status. Many applications never issue with the claims as published.
• Do nothing, deliberately. Document the analysis and the reasoning. A recorded decision is worth far more later than an undocumented shrug.

The part that matters most

Companies that handle competitor filings well are not the ones with the fastest lawyers. They are the ones that already know what they own, what they built, and when they built it. That inventory turns a thirty day fire drill into a normal Tuesday.