Patents, AI, and the Future of Attorney Practice
Thanks to everybody who took my survey last week. 45% of participating patent attorneys prefer a self-hosted, local AI solution. So I thought I’d share a 100% private, offline installation with you today: Installation and Settings Which Local LLM is Best? The available LLMs are constantly evolving. My current favorite picks are: These run fast … Read more
Let’s be honest: by 2026, we’ve all started thinking about using AI to help with patent drafting. The promises of massive time-savings are just too good to ignore. But there is a massive risk to how we practice that we aren’t talking about enough. I recently came across research by Advait Sarkar from Microsoft Research, … Read more
If you define your value through the documents you produce, you’re in trouble. Computers can now draft patent applications, office action replies and opposition briefs with near-perfect fluency. The Advisory Trap I remember how I was trained two decades ago. My supervisor taught me to be a neutral facilitator: “Here are the examiner’s objections and three … Read more
A popular framework suggests AI can handle low-stakes legal work while humans tackle the high-stakes issues. This idea, recently discussed in a LinkedIn post by Kevin Ahlstrom, is seductive but rests on a catastrophic misconception. It wrongly assumes a patent attorney’s job is just to find ‘correct answers.’ If that were true, the profession would … Read more
In my recent livestream, we walked through two exciting new patents from OpenAI. Here’s a quick recap of what makes these patents worth your attention. Custom GPTs — Building Tailored AI Models The first patent is titled “Systems and Methods for Generating Customized AI Models” (US 12,406,207 B2). It’s the patent behind OpenAI’s Custom GPTs … Read more
No one ever told the inventor why the safety rules changed between places. At the western edge of the site—past the scaffolds, past the corroded stairwell with the missing fourth step, past even the dusty sign warning of “hazardous particles beyond this point”—there lay what the workers called the second environment. No one ever asked … Read more
This European patent introduces a clever way for cameras and tracking systems to better handle moments when an object temporarily disappears from view—like when a person walks behind a tree or a car passes behind a building. Instead of losing track completely, the system learns from past tracking failures. It records where objects typically vanish … Read more
The European Patent Office’s (EPO) Boards of Appeal (BoA) are on a mission: slash their case backlog even further. After successfully reducing cases older than 30 months below 10% in early 2024, they promptly set a new, tougher target in their annual report 2024: no more than 10% of pending cases older than 24 months … Read more
The inventor no longer lived among others. He passed through public spaces the way thoughts passed through the heads of bureaucrats—quietly, unnoticed, but with purpose. In the pale blue glow of his apartment, he watched, calculated, and recorded. He believed not in progress, nor in revolution, but in pattern. His city was a symphony of … Read more
In the vast, echoing chambers of the European Patent Office, where the air itself seemed composed of regulations and the light filtered through panes etched with the weary history of countless applications, there existed a problem. It was a problem that gnawed at the edges of computational progress, a persistent inefficiency that troubled the abstract … Read more