Clerq

Clerq is the AI clerk for patent professionals.

A law clerk works under an attorney’s direction – takes the assignment, reads everything, and comes back with a memo that shows its work. So does Clerq. Hand it a research assignment and it construes the key terms, plans the search strategy, and analyzes everything that comes back the way an expert would. What returns is a cited, reasoned report you can review like any work product that crosses your desk, with checkpoints wherever you want them, and as much or as little intervention as the matter needs.

Underneath is the NLPatent model, five years in development and trained to understand the language of patents, searching across 500 million patent and non-patent literature documents. It powers everything we ship – the agents, the search and intelligence platform for when you want your hands on the wheel, and the API for teams building patent capability into their own stack.

We were founded in 2021 as NLPatent, on a bet that language models could learn the language of patents – this was before anyone was talking about LLMs. We went deep on one deceptively hard problem, patent research, and stayed there, because every high-value task in patent work starts with knowing what already exists – and everything downstream inherits the quality of that answer. In 2026, we became Clerq. The name changed. The intelligence didn’t.

More than 2,000 professionals at top law firms and innovative companies have made Clerq part of their practice. Every conclusion arrives with its citation and its reasoning – the work is shown, never a black box. Client data is never used for training.

Patent work gets done differently now.

Say hello to Clerq.