Using AI assistants in patent drafting and prosecution is being widely discussed, including in this series of articles. Until now, aspects related to the person skilled in the art or the drafting and examination of patent applications have been addressed in those pieces.
One could now ask the question: how do the expectations of potential clients change in respect of the work of patent attorneys?
How patent work begins
All patent work starts with an order or an enquiry from a potential client – whether an inventor or applicant – addressed to a patent attorney: this is the idea, how can I protect it, and how much does it cost?
Main aspects generating unrealistic expectations
Every industry professional receives correspondence promising miraculous solutions of AI patent drafting in 15 minutes from the idea to the patent application. Maybe some of the readers of this article are involved in creating such programs.
There are at least two negative side-effects of the aforementioned reality.
Many inventors/potential applicants – especially those who do not have experience with patent applications prior to the ‘invasion’ of AI assistants – are convinced that the new AI assistants will complete every aspect of the job. Some of them arrive with an already-made patent application conceived by an AI assistant that, at first glance for an inexperienced person, looks fine.
Upon closer examination, however, the majority of these applications are full of significant errors: they fail to capture the gist of the invention, the length of the text and repetition make them difficult to read, and the text is full of epithets and augmented qualities (looking more like a publicity pamphlet than a patent application). The consequence? A patent attorney spends more time convincing the client that the AI-drafted application is not what it should be than in drafting the application itself.
Some of these discussions, being preliminary to the conclusion of the contract, are not billed. Thus, the time of the patent attorney is lost with unnecessary work.
In some cases – particularly responding to office actions or carrying out translations – clients are of the opinion that by using AI assistants, the work of the patent attorney should be billed less, as someone else is doing the job. This is clearly an unrealistic expectation. While using AI assistants may be useful in preparing a response to an office action, the time required for the office action itself is not necessarily shortened, because a good attorney would take the time to verify all the hints given by the AI assistants.
Practically, for responding to office actions, the only advantage of AI assistants is that they provide ideas that otherwise would not have arisen to the patent attorney. However, not all the ideas are good. For translations, the expectations are worse. Some machine translations are better than others; however, all texts have to be proofread for a quality translation. A patent attorney consequently needs to fight more than before to be reasonably paid for the work carried out.
Implications for the patent attorney profession
As always with new technologies, some adapt quicker than others and not all make use of the technology in the same way.
In the author’s opinion, the unrealistic expectations of clients that the level of fees of patent attorneys will decrease with the use of AI assistants will have a negative impact on the profession because of the following:
On one hand, a higher number of low-quality professionals is emerging, who will make extensive use of the AI assistants. If the clients are new and inexperienced in the matter, they will be unable to distinguish good-quality work from poor-quality work, so they will accept poor quality work until something happens in the lifetime of the applications, such as a final rejection that could have been avoided by proper drafting.
On the other hand, higher-quality professionals who rightfully want to charge reasonable fees for good work will have difficulties in maintaining the correct level of remuneration.
The above considerations are particularly valid for the range of clients with low to moderate budgets for patent work.
Conclusion on clients’ expectations of patent attorneys given AI ‘assistance’
The use of AI assistants negatively impacts the patent attorney profession because they create unrealistic expectations for clients that the work can be done quicker and cheaper, which is not always the case.
