This report outlines our participation in CLEF-IP's 2009 prior art search task. In the task's initial year our focus lay on the automatic generation of effective queries. To this aim we conducted a preliminary analysis of the distribution of terms common to topics and their relevant documents, with respect to term frequency and document frequency. Based on the results of this analysis we applied two methods to extract queries. Finally we tested the effectiveness of the generated queries on two state of the art retrieval models. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; H.3.7 Digital LibrariesH.3.7 [Information storage and retrieval]: Digital Libraries General Terms Measurement, Performance, Experimentation Keywords Patent Retrieval, Prior Art Search, Automatic Query Formulation