Generation of Claim Summary Section

Patent Bots latest tool is for automatic generation of the claim summary section of your patent application. The claim summary section is the most tedious part of drafting a patent application...

Suppose you have a claim like this:

A method for perpetual motion comprising magic.

For the claim summary, you need to rewrite this claim like this:

In some aspects, the techniques described herein relate to a method for perpetual motion including magic.

Not hard for a single short claim, but mind numbing when you have several pages of claims.

The reason for creating a claim summary section is to ensure that your patent application has literal support for the claims. In my practice, I'm careful to make sure that the detailed description section (which does not include the claim summary section) describes the invention using the same words and phrases of the claims, but the claim summary section provides a good backup.

Our Word add-in allows you to generate a claim summary within Word. Here is a screenshot:

After you complete a draft of your patent application, you put the cursor in an empty paragraph. Then, click the Generate Claim Summary button, and we rewrite the claims as indicated above.

In particular, we make two changes:

1. Prepend this text to each claim: "In some aspects, the techniques described herein relate to"
2. Change "comprising" to "including" to favor an open-ended interpretation (see MPEP 2111.03).

In a poll we did last month, 80% of respondents stated that the above claim summary would work for them.

Hopefully it works for you too, but please let us know if you recommend any changes to how we generate the claim summary.

Generation of Brief Description of Figures

In drafting a patent application, one of the last things I write is the Brief Description of the Figures section. This is my process:

1. Search for the first sentence to mention each figure (you can use our Figure navigation tools to make this part easy).
2. Copy that sentence and paste it into the Brief Description of the Figures section
3. Review and modify as needed.

This is a tedious task that requires very little brain power, and the Patent Bots Word add-in now does the first two steps for you!

Here is what it looks like:

We are smart about picking the best sentence for each figure. For example suppose you have a sentence like this in the beginning of your patent application:

• Figs. 1-3 illustrate the invention.

and later you have sentences

• Fig. 1 is a method ...
• Fig. 2 is a system ...
• Fig. 3 is a device ...

then we will figure out that these three sentences are better suited for the Brief Description of the Figures than the previous sentence and use those instead.

We hope you like this new feature, and we have more generation tools in the pipeline to automate other tedious parts of your work.

Poll Results: Which are the Most Important Factors for Patent Quality?

We polled the attendees of our webinar "Best Practices for Patent Quality" held on June 24, 2021, about what factors were most important for patent quality. 

Attendees could select as many of the factors as they wanted and here are the results. Interesting that proofreading tools rank so highly.

PatentPlex Claim Diff Tool

The inspiration for new Patent Bots features frequently comes from frustrations I encounter as a patent practitioner.  Recently, I was working on a child application, and I wanted to see the differences between the claims of the parent and the grandparent.  This is what I had to do:

• Copy the claims of the grandparent into a Word doc
• Copy the claims of the parent into a Word doc
• Use the Word compare documents feature to see the differences

While this works, it is tedious and time consuming... To not have to do this any more, I created the PatentPlex Claim Diff Tool:

To see the differences between the claims of two patents, you just enter the patent numbers and select the claims you want to compare!  Our Claim Diff Tool is available for free for the next two weeks on our PatentPlex page.  Afterwards, you will need a PatentPlex subscription.

We also have a short video showing you how to use our Claim Diff Tool:

Webinar: Best Practices For Patent Quality - Hosted by Patent Bots & Harrity LLP

Expert patent attorneys share tried and true methods to increase quality & efficiency in your patent practice. 

Join: Bernie Codd (McDermott Will & Emory), Michael Drapkin (Holland and Hart LLP), Paul Harrity (Harrity LLP), and Jeff O'Neill (Founder, Patent Bots).

June 24, 10AM PST / 1PM EST

Space limited! 

REGISTER by clicking the graphic below: 

Colorblind Friendly Colors for Proofreading

We’ve heard from some red/green colorblind users that they have trouble seeing our proofreading results. 

So we’ve now added an option to use blue/yellow/red instead of green/yellow/red to help colorblind users get the benefit of our proofreading. 

Here is an example:

If you’d like to use the colors above, reply to this email, and we’ll set it up for you.

New Feature: Automated Insertion of Reference Labels Into Claims

Certain patent drafting tasks are very tedious…  One of those is inserting or removing reference labels from your claims.  We are happy to report that we now automate this process for you.

In our Word add-in, the Patent Drafting tool has a new tab for Claims:

In this tab, we automatically insert ref labels into your claims.  We can remove them for you as well.

We’d love to get your feedback to make this work well for you.  For example, “current transformer” above has more than one label and we currently insert both labels.  Is that the right thing to do?

We’ll be adding more cool features coming in the Claims tab soon, such as automatic renumbering.