Resources
Essential frameworks, guides, and tools for navigating innovation,
creativity, and ownership in the AI era.
Looking for fill-in worksheets? Browse the Document Templates hub, disclosure forms for inventors, plus §101/§103 work-aids for practitioners.
Patent Representation Index
A composite score ranking 91 tech companies on how well they translate women's technical work into patent inventorship. Built from BigQuery patent data and government EEO-1 workforce filings. Five sub-indices, weighted, normalized 0-100.
See the RankingsWhy Most Software Patents Start Too Late
The entire patent industry assumes someone already knows they have an invention. For software engineers, that assumption is almost always wrong. The gap is not the filing process. It is the discovery step.
Read the GuideIs it obvious?
Section 102 asks whether your invention is already there. Section 103 asks the harder question: even if it is not, would getting there have been obvious?
Read the ClusterThe Patent Gender Gap by the Numbers
Women make up 29% of the STEM workforce but hold 12.8% of U.S. patents. The gap isn't talent. A 9-page research series covering the prosecution funnel, the PNAS 2026 "breakthrough penalty" study, AI patenting, international data, and evidence-based interventions.
Read the SeriesWhat Is Patent Mining?
Patent mining extracts hidden value from data sources, engineering teams, and codebases. Three definitions, the crypto mining parallel, and how AI changes the discovery step.
Read the GuideWhat counts as prior art?
A patent, a publication, a public use, a sale, or anything else available to the public. The one-year grace period is narrower than almost everyone expects.
Read the ClusterThe PPA as a Stock Option on Your IP
A provisional patent application costs $65-$325 and buys you 12 months. Think of it like a stock option: a small premium for the right to decide later whether to invest fully.
Read the GuideSoftware patents in Europe
Usually described as a flat prohibition, and the article does not say that. The exclusion is a shape rather than a subject, and it turns on two words.
Read the ClusterPatent Continuations
A continuation turns one specification into a patent family: new claims, same priority date, no new matter. Why disclosed-but-unclaimed scope can be dedicated to the public, the copendency and term rules, the double-patenting tradeoff, and an honest read on where AI drafting helps.
Read the GuideInvention Disclosure Procedure
Most engineering teams have no procedure for capturing inventions. The gap is not filing. It is recognizing what to file. A 7-step process from recognition through filing.
Read the ProcedureHow your application is put together
Format rules sound like housekeeping and two of these are not. Engineers get the flow-chart rule wrong by default, because putting a diagram beside its explanation is correct everywhere else.
Read the ClusterSoftware Patents After Alice
Alice changed the rules, not the game. 58% of software patents still get approved. A guide to what survives, prosecution strategies, and what developers should document.
Read the GuideContinuation Claims
A continuation is a vehicle for adaptive claiming, not adaptive disclosure. What the Federal Circuit permits when claims are drafted with a competitor's product in mind, where the original disclosure caps that reach, and what Kroy did and did not decide about asserting unadjudicated claims after an adverse IPR.
Read the ReferenceBuilding in Public and Patents
The modern way to build software is, by default, the fastest way to disclose an invention before anyone files on it. How a public commit, Show HN post, or open-source release starts the section 102 clock, why the US grace period is a fallback rather than a plan, and why foreign rights close immediately.
Read the GuideSection 101 Declaration Strategy (SMEDs)
The USPTO's April 30, 2026 memo clarifies and reinforces the Subject Matter Eligibility Declaration as a voluntary §101 evidence tool. Practitioner adoption is uneven and the §132(a) new-matter rule constrains what a SMED can do. The evidentiary opportunity lives at the drafting stage, not the prosecution stage.
Read the GuideCo-Founder IP: Who Owns What
Two founders build a product. Who owns the patents? Without an assignment agreement, each co-inventor can independently license the invention to your competitor. Without permission. Without sharing a dollar.
Read the GuideWho Owns Your Side Project?
Your employment agreement claims more than it can enforce. California, Washington, New York, and eight other states limit invention assignment clauses by statute. What decides the question is not contract language but four evidentiary gates, and your commit history is quietly answering all of them.
Read the GuideAI Patent Discovery and Privilege
GAI use in patent drafting may not enjoy attorney-client privilege (Baker Donelson, May 2026). The risk is real for generic LLM use; structured-disclosure tools with audit trails are categorically different in discovery.
Read the GuideOpen Source Licenses and Patent Rights
A license is a patent instrument as much as a copyright one. The Apache 2.0 grant is irrevocable but narrower than most assume, MIT's silence is not the shield it looks like, and defensive termination can cost you the license to your own dependency the day you sue.
Read the GuideIP Ownership Clauses for Remote Contractors
A remote contractor can write your next core patent before lunch. Without the right cross-border assignment language, they may still own it.
Read the GuideAI Inventorship and Human Conception
Built it with Cursor, Copilot, or Claude Code? Under Thaler v. Vidal and the USPTO's November 2025 revised guidance, only humans can be inventors, even when AI tools materially contribute. A doctrinal walk-through plus a conception note template and practitioner intake checklist.
Read the GuideIP Protection Checklist for Engineers
Your team ships code every day. Some of it is novel enough to patent. Without a checklist, those inventions get published with no filing date and no protection. Five areas, eighteen items.
Get the ChecklistTight Ownership for AI Code Teams
When AI generates most of the code, who conceived the invention? A practical protocol for capturing inventorship evidence before the filing scramble.
Read the ProtocolAgentic AI Inventorship: The Open Question
Using Copilot is settled, the human conceives and is the inventor. When an autonomous agent does most of the building on its own, no patent office or court has decided who invents. A frontier map: what's settled globally (human inventor required), what's open, and the conception record to build while it's unsettled.
Read the AnalysisAI Patent Risk: 2026 Firm Consensus
Baker Donelson, Hogan Lovells, Kirkland, Alston & Bird, and Arnold & Porter have all published 2026 alerts on AI-drafted patent risk. The consensus on discovery, privilege, work product, and validity, and what it means for prosecution practice.
Read the RoundupDrafting with Local AI
Patent practice has a sharper version of the AI confidentiality problem. We measured what self-hosted drafting costs across 29 models. Whether the weights are open barely matters, about 4 points. How much memory you have matters enormously, about 23.
Read the AnalysisCloud AI Leaks: Trade Secrets vs Patents
Pasting code into a cloud AI can jeopardize both trade secret protection and patent eligibility before you knew there was a decision to make. ~1,500 federal trade secret cases filed in 2025. The fix starts before your code touches the cloud.
Read the AnalysisWhy Local-First Matters for Patent Discovery
Before you file a patent, your invention is a trade secret. Any AI tool that processes unfiled inventions in the cloud introduces risk across three legal frameworks. Local-first scanning eliminates all three.
Read the GuideA Completed Disclosure
Most disclosure guidance tells you what to write. This shows a finished one: a fictional software invention taken from a ten-minute flag through the full technical record, with the evidence and contributor questions filled in.
Read the WalkthroughFinding Inventions in Code
Distinctive engineering rarely announces itself. Twelve places it tends to hide, a seven-step process for surfacing it, and a 30-minute review agenda you can run this sprint.
Read the GuidePatent Documents and the Cloud
Three legal frameworks govern how pre-filing patent documents can be stored and processed. The risk isn't cloud itself. It's how long your unfiled invention sits on someone else's server.
Read the AnalysisAI Tool Compliance Checklist
AI adoption among patent professionals is 15% while general legal AI is at 79%. The gap is confidentiality. A structured checklist for evaluating AI tools before they touch client material.
Get the ChecklistAI Agents and Your Intellectual Property
99% of dev teams use AI coding tools. 29% are prepared to secure them. When your agent reads your codebase, where does that code go? The answer has legal consequences.
Read the GuideIP Ownership in Local-First Sync Engines
Distributed contributors, open-source CRDTs, and cross-border teams create unique IP ownership risks. Learn how to secure clean patent title before it becomes a deal-breaker.
Read the GuideTesla's .smol Patent: What It Actually Claims
Tesla's WO2024073080 describes a hybrid columnar-row file format for ML training data. This analysis walks in-house counsel through the eligibility, prior art, and disclosure risks.
Read the AnalysisProtecting Creativity in the AI Era
A practical guide for artists, developers, and knowledge workers to safeguard their ideas, innovations, and value in an age where AI can absorb everything you create.
Explore the GuideTechnology Discrimination
The patent system may not discriminate against inventions on paper, yet still discriminate among inventors in practice. Access barriers and eligibility skepticism compound for software builders.
Read the AnalysisPatenting AI Agents for Autonomous Payments
Bank of America grew its AI patent portfolio 94% from 2022 to 2024 while most fintech founders are still asking whether their agentic payment system is patentable. A practical guide to what is, what isn't, and where the legal landmines sit.
Read the GuideInvention Discovery in AI-Augmented Sprints
When sprints compress from weeks to days, documentation shrinks with them. Novel solutions get committed, merged, and forgotten. A practical workflow for AI-augmented dev teams to capture inventive work before competitors file first.
Read the GuideThe AI drafting trial
A randomized trial of 133 patent lawyers at eleven firms. Quality rose while the tool was available; when it was removed, only the senior lawyers kept the gain.
Read the EvidenceDesign patents for interfaces
Since March 2026 a design claim to a GUI or icon need not depict the screen, if the title and claim identify the article. The requirement moved into the words.
Read the Guide