Shawn Lillemo

Patent application drafters are front-line participants to some of the most amazing innovations in the world today. A recent WIPO paper on Artificial Intelligence (AI) outlines how we are filing for patents on knowledge automation at an increasing rate. Our current tools, however, do not reflect the innovations with which we are so familiar. Historically—and to this day—the process of drafting a patent application has been a manual task. It is a task that takes, on average, 40 hours of a highly-skilled patent application drafter’s time. Anyone who has drafted any volume of patent applications for a client knows that the drafting process typically involves the use of boilerplate language and substantial copy and paste operations. While performing these repetitive tasks, we have all thought: “there must be a better way.” While we find ourselves surprised by the lack of tools to help with patent application drafting, we recognize the challenges that must be overcome. Different attorneys, firms, and clients often have different styles and preferences when it comes to the way patent applications are drafted. Thus, any automation tools would necessarily need to handle these different styles and preferences. But these challenges notwithstanding, the days of drafting a patent application completely manually by a single patent drafter are coming to an end.