IP & Patent

Intellectual property and patent law protect inventions — drafting and filing patent applications, prosecuting them through patent offices, searching the prior art to assess novelty, and analyzing patents in disputes and due diligence. It is among the most technical and document-heavy corners of law, combining deep subject-matter expertise with painstaking search and drafting. Until recently it had almost no dedicated AI tooling; by 2026 a strong, well-funded cluster of patent-specific AI products had emerged.

The work is a natural fit for AI: patent drafting follows highly structured conventions, prior-art search is a massive retrieval problem across tens of millions of documents, and invalidity analysis is pattern-matching claims against references. AI now drafts applications and office-action responses, runs semantic prior-art searches that surface relevant references a keyword search would miss, and analyzes patent portfolios for litigation and licensing — compressing work that consumed enormous attorney time.

Patlytics is an AI-native, end-to-end patent platform spanning drafting, prosecution, invalidity analysis, and litigation support, used across a large share of top patent firms. Solve Intelligence focuses on high-quality patent drafting and office-action responses across multiple jurisdictions, and DeepIP brings an AI patent assistant into the attorney's workflow across the patent lifecycle. The general legal assistants Harvey and CoCounsel also handle IP research and drafting as part of broader legal work.

AI is compressing the most time-intensive parts of patent practice — drafting, prior-art search, and analysis — which pressures the billable hours those tasks generated and reshapes the work of patent agents and junior associates. The valued skills shift toward inventiveness, claim strategy, and the technical and legal judgment that decides what to protect and how. The accuracy stakes are high: a patent is a legal instrument, and an error in the claims or a missed prior-art reference has real consequences, so a licensed patent attorney reviews and remains accountable for everything filed. AI accelerates the drafting and the search; it does not sign the application.