Latest Thought Leadership

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are betting on AI moats. The public patent record says most of those moats have not been built.

Between August 2025 and August 2026, 187 US-headquartered tech companies raised rounds of $100 million or more, roughly $273 billion in all. We screened every one against USPTO application data. 107 of them (57%) have no visible US patent applications. Another 29 have fewer than ten.

Whether or not AI is a bubble, every boom ends with the same question from investors, acquirers, and lenders: what is actually left? A valuation is a claim on future cash flows. A patent is a claim on a market. Most of this cohort holds plenty of the first and, on the public record, almost none of the second.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

What 37 CFR 11.18 actually certifies — and why the Office’s own manual says so.

There is a criticism of AI-assisted patent drafting that has hardened into conventional wisdom faster than anyone bothered to check it. It runs like this: a practitioner who prepares an application in a fraction of the traditional time cannot have made the “inquiry reasonable under the circumstances” that 37 CFR 11.18(b)(2) requires. Fewer hours, less inquiry. Less inquiry, unreasonable inquiry. Unreasonable inquiry, a Rule 11.18 problem.

The argument has the shape of common sense, which is why it circulates without much resistance. It is also wrong at the second step, and the authority establishing that it is wrong is not obscure. It is in the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, in the section the Office wrote specifically to explain what reasonable inquiry means. Reasonable inquiry has never been measured in hours. It has never been measured in effort at all.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

The 50-patent club shrank for a decade, and not evenly. Every output band below 1,000 patents a year contracted. One grew 41%.

Nine years ago, IPWatchdog listed every firm that put its name on at least 50 issued U.S. utility patents. There were 803. PatentBots now ranks every firm the same way for the year ending Q1 2026: 709 clear the bar.

The list came up ninety-four firms shorter, and the patents kept coming. The USPTO issued 318,828 utility patents in 2017 and about 325,800 in 2025. Same output, ninety-four fewer firms producing it at scale.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

Maximize priority. Minimize cost. Preserve optionality. Three goals that have traded off against each other for as long as anyone has practiced — and why agentic drafting is what finally lets a client have all three.

Every patent program is trying to do three things at once: claim the most ground from the earliest date, spend the least, and close off no path before it has to be closed.

The first and the third are bought with the same instrument. More filings, earlier, means more priority — and also more live paths, which is what optionality is. They are complements, not rivals. What separates a client from having both is the second item: what a filing costs. That was never a doctrinal limit. It was a price.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

In July 2019, I posted a histogram to a company blog and it became one of the ten most-read guest articles on IP Law360 that year. The chart showed active patent practitioners binned by their earliest year of USPTO registration, and it said something nobody wanted to hear: “There are more active practitioners today with 21-25 years of practice experience than there are active practitioners with 1-5 years experience.”

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

Every so often we look at the searches that lead people to Paximal. Most are what you’d expect — our name, “patent drafting software,” a few competitors. But two of them stopped me, because they’re not looking for a tool. They’re looking for reassurance:

“will patent attorneys be replaced by ai” and “will patent lawyers be replaced by ai.”

Someone typed that. Probably more than one someone. So here’s a straight answer.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

I had meetings recently with two chief patent counsels — one runs IP for a major automotive company, the other for a global technology leader. Different industries, different docket sizes, different everything. But I made the same argument to both, and got the same answer from both.

The argument: AI has changed what it costs, in money and time, to produce a high-performing patent application. When a complete, fully-enabled, amendment-ready draft can be generated in just a few hours instead of days, the economics that shaped patent strategy for 40 years no longer hold. And once drafting is cheap, the smart posture for most portfolios reduces to three moves — maximize priority rights, maintain optionality, delay cost.

Both said, in almost the same words: that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Which raises the obvious question. If the people running IP at sophisticated, well-resourced companies are deliberately maximizing priority, preserving optionality, and deferring spend — why do so many law-firm patent attorneys still preach the opposite? Why is the default advice from outside counsel so often “let’s get this to allowance as fast as we can”?

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

Ask three patent attorneys whether an application is “high-quality” and you’ll get three confident answers. Press on what they mean and they converge on something real: technical drafting quality — whether the document applies the craft’s rules and conventions consistently and comprehensively. It’s a genuine discipline, and we care about it.

But the word hides two things. Judging that quality is more subjective than it sounds. And — the part that matters — it measures the drafting, not the worth of the patent.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

In 1986, MIT’s Eric von Hippel published a finding that broke the standard story of how innovation works. The standard story is linear: a manufacturer does the R&D, ships a product, and users consume it. Von Hippel kept finding the arrow running backward. The most useful innovations were coming from users, the people closest to the problem, who modified what they had to fit needs the manufacturer never anticipated. His “lead users,” working at the front edge of a field, turned out to be a richer source of new ideas than the producers serving them. The catch was always the toolkit: user innovation takes off only when the means of building reach the people with the problems.

That’s the lens I keep coming back to with the Paximal MCP. Of everything the release does, my favorite thing isn’t a feature. It’s that it hands the toolkit to practitioners and lets them build patent-drafting workflows we never designed and wouldn’t have thought to.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq.

For as long as patent practice has had a drafting phase, the drafting has been done in a vacuum. You write the strongest application you can from the disclosure and the prior art — and you write it without much specific information about how this particular application will be examined. The decisions that shape outcome — claim scope, embodiment emphasis, language choices in the spec — get made when you know the least.

When we announced the Paximal–Juristat collaboration earlier this year, the point of the partnership was to break that pattern. The MCP release is what makes the partnership operational. With both connectors active in a Claude Cowork session, a single conversation has access to Paximal’s drafting agents and Juristat’s view into every examiner, art unit, and outcome in the published US prosecution record. The result is something the patent world hasn’t quite had before: drafting that’s informed by what actually gets allowed, by whom, and how.