On November 18, 2025, Whirlpool sued multiple competitors, including LG, Samsung, Electrolux, and Haier, for infringing its microwave patents.

The primary objective for the defendants should, of course, be to win the lawsuit. However, given the high stakes, all options must be considered. Competitors will certainly seek to invalidate Whirlpool's patents, yet they face uncertainty with the prospect of losing both the infringement suit and the invalidation process.

The only remaining option is a settlement or licensing deal. The worst possible preparation for this scenario is to have a weak hand: losing the infringement suit, failing the invalidation, and having no other bargaining power.

There is a way for the defendants to regain their footing, strengthen their position for settlement or licensing negotiations, and even force Whirlpool to completely abandon its infringement suit in one action: launch patent infringement counter-attacks. This completely shifts the dynamic, and Whirlpool could even emerge as the sole loser.

The problem is that all defendants possess massive portfolios with thousands of granted patents that could serve as leverage for a counter-suit or cross-licensing negotiation, but matching all of these patents against Whirlpool's products is time-consuming and expensive. If only you could offload that work to a tool that highlights potential patent infringements in a couple of minutes...

Introducing Patalyze

To demonstrate how easy and fast this process is with Patalyze, we gave ourselves the challenge to find potential counter-attack infringement lawsuits for LG, Samsung, Electrolux, and Haier in less than an hour. After all, the power of Patalyze lies in its speed and scalability, so we did the following:

Defining the Products

We sourced public documentation for four popular Whirlpool microwave models from their website:

• WNMN102BKF
• AMW 9605/NB
• WMBN5 R3 PT
• MAX 38 SL

Patalyze parsed these documents to extract a structured view of product features. By analyzing the technical specifications and user manuals, the system identified hardware components and functional capabilities, converting unstructured documentation into a data model that can be systematically compared against patent claim elements.

Each product was also automatically added as a column in the research database:

Selecting the Patents

We then needed to find the 'needles' in the massive haystacks of the defendants' portfolios. Patalyze provides intuitive filters and boolean logic to scan our global patent database.

For this research we curated the defensive patent set by filtering for:

• Assignee: Filtered for patents assigned to Samsung, LG, Electrolux, or Haier.
• Status & Age: Limited to granted patents with a priority date within the last 20 years.
• Relevance: Applied keyword filters and classification codes to focus on microwave technology.

For each company, these filters yielded 160–360 patents. Each patent became a row in the database.

Automatic Matching

Upon importing the patents, Patalyze automatically analyzed text, images, and other information from the product documentation and the language of the patent claims.

The database cells immediately populated with a color Indicator and a %-score for each independent patent claim, creating a heatmap to identify overlaps between the patents and products.

The entire process from uploading documentation to generating automated claim charts took about 20 minutes.

Evaluation

With the database populated, users can leverage automated scores to prioritize effectively.

First we filtered out patents with low claim scores, so that the initial view only contains the most important matches between patents and products.

You can further sort individual columns by claim score so that you quickly identify the most relevant patents for a specific product.

When clicking on the individual claims, the claim elements appear with indicators for each claim element to show if the product contains that particular element.

Indicator	Meaning
✓	A product feature corresponds to the respective claim element.
(✓)	Documentation discloses indicators suggesting a corresponding feature is present.
X	No product feature was found corresponding to the claim limitation.

Professional users can drill deeper by accessing the complete EOU claim chart. With one click, the chart displays claim elements alongside matching product features. For full transparency, hyperlinks lead directly to the respective sections in the original documents.

The most interesting findings for each defendant are:

• Electrolux: US9055618B2 vs. MAX 38 SL and WMBN5 R3 PT
• Haier: CN216556678U vs. WNMN102BKF and AMW 9605/NB and WMBN5 R3 PT and MAX 38 SL
• Samsung: EP3685103B1 vs. AMW 9605/NB
• LG: EP2061996B1 vs. WNMN102BKF and WMBN5 R3 PT

Electrolux and LG appear to have particularly strong candidates for counter-lawsuits. However, the full analysis reveals numerous other potential candidates across all defendants beyond the four highlighted here. We encourage the defendants (and the public) to explore the complete results and draw their own conclusions. The full research databases are open for validation and available via the links below:

• Electrolux vs. Whirlpool
• Haier vs. Whirlpool
• Samsung vs. Whirlpool
• LG vs. Whirlpool

This result shows that effective leverage is often already present in a company's patent portfolio, hidden only by the volume of data. By automating the mapping of their intellectual property against competitor products, we identified actionable infringement cases in a fraction of the time traditionally required. In just a couple of minutes the entire case shifted from defense to offense.