Tuesday, September 14, 2021

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.