A trusted IP leader serving innovators worldwide

With a history spanning over a century, Gowling WLG is one of the world’s most respected law firms, offering deep expertise across industries and geographies. Within its broad practice areas, Gowling maintains one of Canada’s largest and most established patent prosecution teams, advising innovators from early-stage biotech startups to multinational pharmaceutical companies. 

From patent drafting and prosecution to portfolio management and IP strategy, Gowling’s patent attorneys help clients bring innovations to market while navigating complex IP landscapes. As the life sciences sector continues to evolve, so do client expectations — and meeting those expectations requires tools that keep pace. 

Today, our role goes far beyond filing patents. Clients expect us to help them understand the broader IP landscape, make strategic decisions, and avoid risks — often under tight timelines.

— Brian Kingwell, senior life sciences patent attorney at Gowling WLG

While Brian focuses on life sciences, attorneys across Gowling’s IP group use Patsnap daily to support clients in a wide range of industries — helping deliver better answers and faster decisions on complex IP issues. 

The challenge: navigating a complex innovation landscape 

Before adopting Patsnap, Gowling’s patent group — one of the largest and most established in Canada — faced growing pressure to deliver sophisticated IP landscape insights and portfolio strategies faster and more efficiently.

Tasks such as chemical structure searches, sequence analysis, and competitive landscape reviews often had to be outsourced to specialized search firms, adding both cost and delays to client service. Traditional tools for managing large patent portfolios or conducting due diligence also offered limited capabilities for the level of insight clients increasingly expected.

The solution: integrated patent intelligence for faster client service

To address these challenges, Gowling adopted Patsnap’s core patent intelligence platform, along with its chemical and biological search tools. Together, these platforms allow Gowling’s attorneys to handle a wide range of complex IP analysis in-house — from global patent searches to competitor assessments and IP strategy support.

Bringing in Patsnap gave us capabilities we simply didn’t have before— especially for portfolio management and competitive analysis.

Patsnap’s core platform is now a daily tool for patent prosecution, portfolio management, and competitive intelligence work. Attorneys use it to search global patent databases, analyze competitor portfolios, and deliver timely insights to clients — without the delays that come from relying on external firms or slower legacy tools.

Patsnap is always open on my screen. I use it all day, every day. Whether I’m looking for copies of patent applications I’ve written or analyzing a competitor’s portfolio, it’s essential to how I work.

The results: transforming Gowling’s competitive edge

1. Bringing high-level IP strategy to more clients

One of the ways Patsnap has transformed Gowling’s practice is by enabling attorneys to offer more strategic IP advisory services, especially for companies that are building IP portfolios for the first time. 

Under Canadian government programs to help companies develop stronger IP strategies, Gowling has been a key advisor — and Patsnap plays a critical role in supporting that work. To provide effective IP strategy guidance, especially for companies pursuing government funding, Gowling’s attorneys need to analyze IP landscapes and competitor portfolios in depth — a task Patsnap makes faster and more efficient. As Brian Kingwell put it, “To give them good advice, we need to analyze the IP landscape and their competitors in depth — and Patsnap lets us do that quickly and effectively.” 

The ability to deliver this level of insight efficiently has allowed Gowling to support a broader range of clients, without the added costs and delays that would have made this work less feasible in the past. 

2. Enabling in-house chemical and biological IP searches

For life sciences clients, chemical and biological sequence searches are essential to evaluating patents and competitors. Before Patsnap, Gowling typically outsourced these searches to specialized firms — but the introduction of Patsnap’s Chem and Bio platforms has brought that capability in-house. Being able to handle these searches internally allows attorneys to iterate and refine search strategies on the fly, which is crucial for complex life sciences matters.

Patent searching is an iterative process. When you outsource, you lose the ability to adjust based on what you’re finding. Patsnap lets us manage that process directly and get better results.

3. Supporting due diligence and helping clients avoid IP roadblocks

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gowling supported life sciences clients developing vaccines and other therapeutics, where understanding the IP landscape quickly was critical. With Patsnap, clients have been able to bring products to market that otherwise would have faced serious IP roadblocks — including during the pandemic, when rapid analysis of complex patent landscapes was essential to help guide clients through challenges that simply weren’t navigable before.

With Patsnap, clients have been able to bring products to market that otherwise would have faced serious IP roadblocks.

Patsnap’s ability to support rapid due diligence and freedom-to-operate assessments has helped Gowling’s clients avoid costly IP conflicts and bring products to market faster.

4. Expanding patent searching as a client offering

Since adopting Patsnap, Gowling has expanded patent searching as an explicit service — offering clients deeper, more actionable insights as part of broader IP strategy engagements. Searching has become a more explicit part of what Gowling offers, in part because Patsnap makes it possible to conduct sophisticated searches in-house — a level of service that was previously outsourced. 

Looking ahead: AI-enabled specification drafting

Looking to the future, Gowling is also exploring how Patsnap’s AI-driven specification drafting tool could reduce the time and effort involved in preparing long, complex patent applications — an area where Brian sees significant potential. 

The upcoming AI spec drafting tool is really promising. Anything that helps eliminate the mechanical parts of writing and lets us focus on strategy will be valuable.

A better way to serve clients

For Gowling, Patsnap has become essential to delivering faster, more strategic IP advice — helping clients protect innovations and succeed in competitive markets.

Patsnap lets us give clients the answers they need, quickly and confidently. It’s become a core part of how we help clients navigate complex IP landscapes and achieve their goals.