Specifio Founder Launches Patent Attorney Network To Leverage AI Drafting Tech

Ian Schick, the co-founder and CEO of patent drafting automation company Specifio has now launched Draft Builders, a ‘gig economy’ patent attorney network, in what is a novel business model for a legal tech start-up.

Draft Builders will operate as a network of vetted US-based registered patent practitioners. The idea is that in turn these lawyers will have access to Specifio’s suite of NLP and Natural Language Generation (NLG) tools that can generate first-draft patent applications and provide automatic patent proofreading.

The tech should make patent attorneys who sign up far more efficient, while the network – which will have a vetting process – will provide clients with a range of tech-supported experts.

The patent preparation service will also be ‘aggressively priced’ – and this is a great example of using tech and better business models to sell legal services in a more competitive manner.

Los Angeles-based Schick stressed that Draft Builders is not a law firm and does not file patent applications itself, but rather produces near-final draft patent applications for its customers’ filing counsel to review and finalise ahead of filing.

Draft Builders will help to assemble patent application documents using network-practitioner-drafted content, auto-generated content, and application templates generated to mimic nearly any specific document or the document styles associated with different law firms or assignees. 

Overall then, what’s not to like? Faster, cheaper, more effective.

Schick said: ‘Draft Builders provides on-demand patent preparation capacity for corporate patent departments and law firms that is consistent, high-quality, and aggressively-priced.

‘At the same time, the platform provides an ad libitum way for qualified independent and law firm practitioners to monetise their own time and patent skills.’

‘Draft Builders is filling an unmet need in the patent preparation market with a US-based option for premium and scalable outsourced patent preparation.’

In addition he told Artificial Lawyer: ‘Specifio is very much a tech development company. It sells patent document automation tools to assist practitioners primarily in law firm patent practices.

‘Draft Builders focuses mostly on corporate patent needs. It is an outsourced patent application preparation platform that leverages a gig economy of vetted patent practitioners to provide input for Specifio’s NLG tech, which Draft Builders licenses.’

Is this a big step? It’s certainly an interesting model in the patent space, i.e. a patent tech company building out a network of attorneys via an associated business. They will then make use of the tech and help to normalise it throughout the market. The network will hopefully generate revenue, while it acts indirectly as a marketing platform for Specifio’s NLP and NLG technology.

Other tech companies have built partner networks too, though perhaps not as formally as this. For example we have seen legal AI doc review companies work hard to partner with ALSPs, but they have not created a separate company to do this.

Overall then, a creative move that could help Specifio to become far more well-known across the market. Here’s wishing Schick good luck with the project.

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