Customer Driven Innovation: 2025 Client Satisfaction Survey Results

At ClearstoneIP, we believe that the best product innovations come from listening to the people who use our platform every day. We are not just measuring performance, we need to understand what's working, what's missing, and where we should focus our development efforts.

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This year, we received feedback from over 60 client accounts, and the results were both validating and energizing. Our mission to define the industry standard for digital freedom-to-operate management was affirmed while highlighting opportunities to enhance the platform even further.

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The Results: Strong Validation 

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The feedback revealed strong satisfaction across multiple dimensions of the Clearstone FTO platform:

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Overall Performance & Tangible Efficiency Gains

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• 81% of users report being "very satisfied" or "extremely satisfied" with how the platform streamlines and automates their patent clearance process and FTO assessments.

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• 85% believe the platform brings good or exceptional value to the FTO process vs. previous methods.

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• 80% of users report moderate to significant time savings leading to faster and more efficient FTO reviews. Of those, 45% report time savings of 30% or more.

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• 70% of users believe the platform's claim-by-claim determination capabilities have enabled massive efficiencies in managing FTO assessments.

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The Features That Matter Most

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When we asked which capabilities were "Critical" or features users "Can't live without in managing FTO investigations in the Clearstone FTO platform," five stood out:

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• Access to historical claim analysis and building a knowledge base: Preserving institutional knowledge is fundamental to effective FTO management, enabling teams to build on prior work rather than starting from scratch.
• Project/Product/Review Architecture: Connecting FTO reviews to specific products ensures that clearance work aligns with business priorities and enables efficient tracking across an organization's innovation portfolio.
• Patent Monitoring with Prosecution History Updates: Staying current on patent status changes prevents surprises and enables proactive response in situations that could impact freedom to operate.
• Collaboration Features: FTO requires coordination across patent teams, outside counsel, and R&D, all while maintaining attorney-client privilege. Seamless collaboration without compromising confidentiality is essential for effective clearance workflows.
• Embedded FTO Workflows: Integrated processes reduce friction and accelerate decision-making by eliminating the need to toggle between multiple systems and manual handoffs.

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Benefits That Drive Real Impact

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Beyond features, we wanted to understand the business outcomes our platform enables. Users identified these as "Game-changing" or "Significant improvements":

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• Building a referenceable knowledge base: Enabling teams to leverage past work and avoid redundant analysis, creating a strategic archive of institutional intelligence that compounds in value over time.
• Streamlined workflows for faster reviews: Creating efficiency within patent departments and freeing up bandwidth for other strategic priorities that drive business value beyond routine clearance work.
• Consistency in determinations and analysis: Reducing variability across reviews improves quality and defensibility, ensuring that FTO conclusions meet a uniform standard regardless of who performs the analysis.
• Greater confidence in claim analysis accuracy: Delivering higher quality analysis, greater consistency across claims determinations, better risk management, and the confidence to make sound business decisions based on FTO conclusions.

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A call to action and opportunity revealed

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One of the most illuminating findings from the survey was that 59% of users weren't yet familiar with our AI Insights functionality. This tells us we have significant untapped value within the platform that could help our user community work even more efficiently. It's a reminder that building great features is only half of the equation—making sure our user community knows about them and understands how to leverage them is equally important. We're addressing this with enhanced onboarding and feature spotlights in Q1 2026.

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Client Feedback Drives Innovation: Looking Ahead to 2026

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User feedback is core to our development philosophy. We're not building features in a vacuum, we're building what IP professionals actually need to manage FTO more effectively. This survey reinforces that when we listen closely to our users, invest in the capabilities that matter most, and communicate transparently about our roadmap, we create products that genuinely move the industry forward.

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More importantly, they give us a clear mandate for 2026: continue refining what's working, address the gaps, and push the boundaries of what's possible in digital FTO management. With that, I am excited to share two major enhancements coming to the platform in early 2026:

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New User Interface 

• We're launching a completely overhauled user interface with an enhanced user experience. This will bring more intuitive workflows, added optimizations, and more flexible preferences to make FTO workflows more intuitive and efficient.

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AI Collection Counsel 

• This is a game-changing AI capability that enables bulk document analysis with generative AI. Users will be able to select a set of patent documents, hundreds or even thousands, and engage with AI to explore, analyze, and receive guidance on any number of legal or technical topics. Think of it as having an AI co-counsel that can process massive document sets and surface insights at scale.

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Stay tuned as we will be sharing more details about both of these enhancements soon, including demos and early access opportunities.

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Thank you to our user community who participated in our survey. Their insights are shaping the future of Clearstone FTO, and the future of freedom-to-operate analysis.

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Want to learn more about how Clearstone FTO can transform your patent clearance process? Contact us for a demo.

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