This paper gives an overview of several different approaches that have been applied by participants in the CLEF-IP evaluation initiative. On this basis, it is suggested that other techniques and experimental paradigms could be helpful in further improving the results and making the experiments more realistic. The field of information seeking is therefore incorporated and its potential gain for patent retrieval explained. Furthermore, the different search tasks that are undertaken by patent searchers are introduced as possible use cases. They can serve as a basis for development in patent retrieval research in that they present the diverse scenarios with their special characteristics and give the research community therefore a realistic picture of the patent user's work.