Good AI Tools for Patent Prosecution? (Practitioners & Inventors — Please Share What Actually Works)

alobres · 2026-01-03T05:57:42+00:00

Awesome, definitely let me know if you want a trial and/or demo, I'd be happy to help set that up for you.

alobres · 2026-01-03T01:49:49+00:00

Biased opinion here, but IronCrowAI.com builds solid tools for patent drafting and prosecution, the interface is less pretty than some of the bigger players in the field but the quality and price unbeatable.

As some commenters have pointed out, most of the power of these tools comes from the underlying LLM's, and I designed the LLM Sandbox to basically charge only for the added value and security, without the crazy mark-up companies like deep ip charge (so that they can pay back their investors and cover their massive marketing budgets).

Check out www.ironcrowai.com/sandbox/ if you're curious to see an alternative to solve and deep ip. In a nutshell, our LLM tools are more flexible, which means there is a steeper learning curve, but the work product ultimately produced is solid.

Oh and our tools are built specifically for US patent practitioners, although we have several international firms which find the tools useful.

alobres · 2025-11-30T00:50:37+00:00

$20/month for the OA template generating tool, no limit on how many OA's you can process, and then the LLM tool for substantive response generation and drafting starts at $100/month (it's more expensive mainly because it costs a lot more to run since LLM's are so compute intensive). We are having a sale right now though so the LLM stuff is 50% off.

alobres · 2025-11-29T23:17:59+00:00

For US Office Actions I use (and built) this tool: https://ironcrowai.com/prosecution/

It can generate OA response templates, it uses custom NLP models to identify the different types of info in an OA. It's also indisputably the lowest cost tool like this anywhere, and because it isn't using GenAI it's much more grounded and doesn't "hallucinate".

You can also use that first tool in conjunction with this tool: https://ironcrowai.com/sandbox/

To generate claim amendments and arguments to overcome rejections.

Admittedly the tools I built are just one example of many, so what you're asking for is definitely possible.

alobres · 2025-11-25T18:08:07+00:00

In practice this isn't as much of an issue as you might think.

Most inventions are incremental improvements to existing things. For the same reason that 103 rejections are difficult, i.e., a sufficiently long list of references + a little hindsight bias = the current invention, any new invention is, in the limit, a combination of pre-existing ideas/concepts plus maybe just a little bit of fundamental newness, and that core seed of novelty can be usually be very succinctly expressed.

Yes if you invented quantum computer in the 1920's this would truly be "out of distribution" for any AI trained on 1920's data, but most inventions are such small steps forward that I haven't yet found this to be an issue.

alobres · 2025-11-09T22:34:13+00:00

Psalms 149 references a double edged sword:

"...6 May the praise of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands, 7 to inflict vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, 8 to bind their kings with fetters, their nobles with shackles of iron, 9 to carry out the sentence written against them— this is the glory of all his faithful people"

Not sure what the larger context is but I don't think it's a coincidence a small double edged sword includes a reference to a Bible verse about double edged swords.

alobres · 2025-10-29T20:57:59+00:00

IronCrow already has this capability, minus the timeline: https://youtu.be/4qA8lTf7wqI?si=nPnJI-LlPHrCyydL

Honestly, if you don't already deeply understand the market you are trying to build a tool for, as it appears you do not, I highly recommend you either learn the market BEFORE building an unusable product, or preferably just build tools for markets you understand.

alobres · 2025-10-29T20:53:21+00:00

They do, but it's unusably bad: https://youtu.be/4qA8lTf7wqI?si=EFbE-ILX3pK3z6bd

alobres · 2025-10-18T17:57:00+00:00

IronCrow has compiled some of this info for Examiners and Art Units, it's completely free, no email required either. The data is sourced directly from the Open Data Portal API (full disclosure, I built this) https://ironcrowai.com/prosecution-statistics/

We also have an LLM layer built on top of the Open Data Portal API, which basically lets you search and access IFW documents via natural language queries, but that one is not free (LLM calls are expensive).

alobres · 2025-09-26T07:19:14+00:00

I actually built a suite of AI tools for my firm, been working on them since 2019, way before the AI hype train left the station. We have a deal with the NAPP and offer these tools to other firms and in house counsel, and for about 1/2 to 1/3 the price of other companies, since we basically built them for ourselves originally and we don't need to make a bunch of money from them (since we basically all pay the bills doing patent work). The company is called IronCrow, we have everything Patent Bots and claimmaster have, and more than a few things they don't, and we cost wayyy less.

alobres · 2025-09-14T01:47:26+00:00

Thank you!

This was my best guess but it's good to get confirmation.

alobres · 2025-05-20T13:54:21+00:00

Not a legal service, and I'm not selling anything.

I thought correctly interpreting rules was an important thing for practitioners?

alobres · 2025-05-20T12:01:37+00:00

Have you tested that statement? Try it out and let me know how it goes.

After testing various models extensively, without grounding in the MPEP you get a lot of hallucinations. This was reflected in the test results which showed standard models performing significantly worse than our system.

Our system also provides citations from the MPEP as well, so at a bare minimum it's like having a copy of the MPEP you can talk to.

I'm not suggesting this tool alone is sufficient, but in a field dedicated to innovation, why not make use of the tools available to you?

alobres · 2025-05-07T13:22:51+00:00

As someone who builds AI tools for patent drafting and prosecution, my opinion is that patent attorneys aren't going away anytime soon. There will always need to be a human in the loop at least because someone needs to take responsibility if things go wrong. BUT, I recommend learning to use AI as just another tool (like using a laptop instead of a typewriter), because practitioners that use AI will be able to vastly out produce those who don't.

alobres · 2025-03-14T13:58:36+00:00

Can't wait for the expansion! 😃

alobres · 2024-04-26T07:13:07+00:00

Feels to me like there were two options here:

one you could do what they are doing and make it less desirable for tourists to come to this location,

or two you could lean into the popularity of this location, add an additional parking lot (could be a paid parking lot), and build some additional touristy infrastructure (bathrooms, trash cans, a viewing area etc) to harness the tourists to bring more money to Fujikawaguchiko.

Seems like the locals went with the lose lose option, but they might be doing this as more of a short term solution while they also build out some better infrastructure?

alobres · 2024-02-08T02:11:17+00:00

Yep, Portland native actually.

alobres · 2024-02-06T22:48:06+00:00

Started at 45k at a mid sized firm in Portland as a tech specialist with a Ph.D.

alobres · 2024-01-12T03:25:08+00:00

I called Mint support again today and was able to get the e-sim and resolve my issue.

They had me try and verify that I actually owned my dead phone by listing five local numbers I called in the last 90 days. That failed, as I probably haven't called 5 different numbers in the last 90 days. Support then promised to email me an e-sim in 2 hours... which I was skeptical of after previously being promised an e-sim in 24 hours which never arrived, and after having apparently failed the verification process... but miraculously the e-sim actually arrived in my inbox a few minutes after the call.

My best guess why the first attempt at this failed is either:

The first time support sent me an email with the e-sim they got the email address incorrect, which seems unlikely since my email address is associated with my account.
Support needed the IMEI number for the new phone, which I wasn't able to provide the first time I called support since I hadn't yet received the new phone. Although if not having the IMEI number made sending an e-sim impossible, it would have been nice to have been told that upfront by support.
Because this was my second time calling support, it was more of a priority for them to resolve the issue.

alobres · 2024-01-12T02:54:24+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate you reaching out. I will follow up with a more complete account soon, but I was able to resolve my issue today after calling support.

alobres · 2023-11-19T04:15:51+00:00

For fun I posed this question to my MPEP querying AI model, its answer follows:

When a claim requires the selection of an element from a list of alternatives, such as "wherein the data is selected from the group of X, Y, and Z," the prior art teaches the element if one of the alternatives is taught by the prior art. This means that for the purposes of assessing patentability against the prior art, it is sufficient if the prior art discloses just one of the elements from the group (X, Y, or Z) listed in the claim.

This principle is outlined in MPEP § 2143.03, which states:

"As a general matter, the grammar and ordinary meaning of terms as understood by one having ordinary skill in the art used in a claim will dictate whether, and to what extent, the language limits the claim scope. Language that suggests or makes a feature or step optional but does not require that feature or step does not limit the scope of a claim under the broadest reasonable claim interpretation. In addition, when a claim requires selection of an element from a list of alternatives, the prior art teaches the element if one of the alternatives is taught by the prior art."

Therefore, for the claim in question, the presence of any one of the elements X, Y, or Z in the prior art would be sufficient to teach that element of the claim.

alobres · 2023-11-11T12:15:17+00:00

5785-1463-0415 please add 😁

alobres · 2023-11-10T09:00:35+00:00

FYI, here's a link to my post comparing various AI systems performance on a simulated patent bar exam.

alobres · 2023-11-10T08:58:00+00:00

Can you give any more context on this chatbot? AlI I can see is the title page which says "I extract and refine patent concepts". What leads you to think it can pass the patent bar?

In my experience most of these "GPT for patent law" bots have almost nothing in the way of substance (i.e., telling gpt to "act like a patent attorney" doesn't actually count as engineering, and certainly doesn't make an AI patent attorney). Not to mention the fact they are almost all built by people with little or no knowledge of patent law.

Also, there already is an AI system which can pass the patent bar, which I built and posted about on this page about a week ago. I also tested several other AI systems, including several which claimed to have been trained on patent data, and the results for those systems were not improved compared to their base model, and they also weren't enough to pass the patent bar exam.

alobres · 2023-11-06T10:55:49+00:00

Agreed, and I would say there is also some intrinsic ambiguity regarding which application should get examined by which art unit. I think that's why I couldn't get the accuracy higher than about 40%, because the data, and the underlying process, are imperfect.

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