High-stakes intellectual property (IP) decisions depend on the strength of your prior art searches. Yet even sophisticated teams continue to miss critical references – often not because of lack of effort but due to underlying human, linguistic, or strategic blind spots.
On December 11, Managing IP will host a webinar with experts from CAS to explore why these gaps persist and how practitioners can meaningfully reduce them.
Matt McBride, director of CAS IP Services, and Mike Axton, manager of the customer success team, will examine the following key areas:
The ‘invisible hand’ in the search box – how human bias shapes decisions without being noticed;
Efficiency versus exhaustiveness – knowing where diminishing returns begin and where risk remains;
Degrees of separation in prior art (the ‘Kevin Bacon effect’) – when concept proximity matters more than keywords; and
Semantic gaps in patent searching – the limitations of language and keyword reliance.
The session will break down the anatomy of common missed references, including poor query design, incomplete content sources, lack of subject-matter context, and over-reliance on automation. Real-world examples from drug discovery and complex technical fields will illustrate practical methods to de-risk critical searches, identify hidden gaps, and present findings clearly for internal decision-making.
The webinar is designed to assist IP search professionals, R&D teams, patent attorneys, and anyone responsible for due diligence or freedom-to-operate assessments. There will be a live Q&A, offering participants the opportunity to address their specific challenges.
Register now and join us at 3pm GMT (10am EST) on December 11.
The speakers
Matthew J McBride
(Director, CAS IP Services, CAS)
Matt is the director of CAS IP Services, managing all aspects of the business and working with customers to develop effective strategies for accessing and managing high-quality intellectual property information. Previously, he was a senior application specialist for the CAS STNext and CAS SciFinder platforms and held roles at Thomson Reuters and Rohm and Haas.
Matt earned a BSc in molecular biology from Purdue University, Indiana, an MSc in plant pathology from the University of Minnesota, and an MSc in business intelligence and analytics from Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. He is a member of the Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) and the American Chemical Society.
Michael Axton
(Manager, Customer Success Specialists, CAS)
Mike is the manager of the customer success specialists in North America, leading a team of CAS solution subject-matter experts that support clients with their intellectual property (IP) strategies and data needs. He was previously a CAS solutions architect, providing consultation and custom solution development for client projects, and has more than 11 years’ experience in IP and patent search.
Mike earned a BSc in chemistry from the University of Mary Washington, Virginia. He is a member of the Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) and the American Chemical Society.
