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 major social-media company. 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 hours instead of weeks, the economics that shaped patent strategy for forty 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.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq

The interesting thing about putting Paximal behind an MCP is not the protocol. It's what disappears when you do — namely, the context switching that used to surround every drafting task. The matter you're working on, the figures you need cleaned up, the formality pass you keep meaning to run, the prior-art question that's been nagging at you since the disclosure call — they all live in one conversation now, with the draft as shared working memory.

This post is for practitioners who want to know what that actually looks like on a Tuesday. We'll walk through four workflows that change the most, and then close with what doesn't change.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq

The patent AI market has been flooded with copilots. That was a predictable first step. Copilots fit neatly into the old model: the human still runs the workflow, and the software helps the human move faster. In patent work, that usually means quicker drafting, quicker edits, and a somewhat more efficient path through familiar steps.

We do not think that is where the market ends.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq

Generative AI is making patent text cheaper to produce. That will not flatten the field. It will make quality filters, reputation, and review discipline more important.

That is the patent-world lesson from Thibault Schrepel’s recent article, The Matthew Effect at Scale: Attention Scarcity and the AI Output Explosion. His point is simple: when AI causes an explosion in output, the bottleneck does not disappear. It moves. The scarce resource becomes attention, and the institutions that allocate attention become more powerful.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq

Patent law firms do not need another reason to compete on drafting cost.

They need a better answer to the question sophisticated clients are increasingly asking: how does this filing strengthen the portfolio we are building?

Why copilots create prompt debt—and why agentic systems win

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq

Copilots promise speed, but they often turn serious work into an endless loop of prompting, re-prompting, and cleanup—where you spend more time managing the model than moving the job forward. The hidden cost is “prompt debt”: fragile instructions that don’t scale, don’t repeat reliably, and quietly increase review and rework. This article argues that the solution isn’t better prompting—it’s a different architecture entirely: agentic systems that own the workflow end-to-end, verify outputs against standards, and pull you in only at the moments where human judgment actually matters.

By Ian Schick, PhD, Esq

In patent drafting, the real constraint isn’t producing a complete draft—it’s how quickly a partner or client can review it with confidence. “Reviewability” is the often-overlooked property that makes that possible: consistent terminology, predictable structure, and clear claim support, not just within a single application, but across an entire portfolio. In the AI era, where verbosity and drift are common, designing for reviewability is one of the fastest ways to improve both efficiency and quality.