Thursday, April 1, 2021

More Patent Drafting Tools in Word

At Patent Bots, we are continuing to add more tools to supercharge patent attorneys and make them more efficient. With our Word add-in, we automate tedious tasks to allow you to increase profits (especially with fixed fee work), write higher quality patents, and make your work more enjoyable.

We've previously posted about our Ref Label Tracker that includes easy navigation, typing shortcuts, and updating of reference labels or the text associated with them.

We have two new more tools patent drafting tools to announce: figure number updating and patent application navigation.

Figure Number Updating

We have a new Figures tab in our Application Drafter panel:


In this tab, we show a list of figures in your application and navigation buttons to easily go to the figure numbers in your Word document. We also have a button to automatically change a figure number and its reference labels.

Suppose you send a final draft of a patent application to a client that has Figs. 1-6. The client wants to add a new Fig. 4 so you have to renumber Figs. 4-6 to Figs. 5-7 and change all of the reference labels. Ugh... We now make this easy!:


To change Fig. 6 to Fig. 7, just enter 7 in the gray box and we'll change all instances of Fig. 6 to Fig. 7 (or Figure 6 or FIG. 6). Even better, we'll also change all reference labels 6## to 7##, such as changing 610 to 710.

Patent Application Navigation

We have another new tab for easy navigation through parts of your patent application. We provide shortcuts for all common patent headings and the first instance of each figure in the Detailed Description section:


Suppose you are editing your claims, and you want to review the details of Fig. 3. Normally, it is tedious to get to the right part of the application. With our shortcuts, we take you there instantly. After reviewing Fig. 3, click the Claims shortcut to go back to the claims.

Our goal is to automate the tedious parts of patent preparation and prosecution to supercharge your workflow! We'll have a lot more like this in the coming months.