Law Firm Tops Patent Quality Scores with Switch to Patent Bots

Pat Finnan
Managing Partner
Edell, Shapiro & Finnan

Edell, Shapiro & Finnan, LLC (ESF) is an intellectual property law firm with particular emphasis on patent and trademark law. Based outside of Washington D.C., the firm’s 30+ attorneys had more than 500 patents issued in 2021 on behalf of clients including Cisco, IBM, and Northrop Grumman.

For years, the firm has leveraged automated proofreading into its patent drafting workflows.

A client of the firm used the Patent Bots Prep & Pros Pro tool, while ESF used another proofreading tool.

“We are always seeking new ways to improve our firm’s deliverables, so we appreciated the introduction to Patent Bots,” partner Andrew Floam said.

ESF attorneys Andrew Floam and Ryan Morton signed up for a 14-day free trial of Patent Bots. Three benefits immediately jumped out to them.

Greater accuracy. Thanks to state-of-the-art language processing, Patent Bots was much more effective at identifying claim word support, claim phrase support, and antecedent basis errors.

Faster workflows. Patent Bots streamlined multiple patent prep workflows and delivered proofreading results much faster than the previous tool.

Intuitive interface. Unlike their previous tool’s outdated Microsoft Word plugin, Patent Bots’s modern web-based interface made it easy for attorneys to understand and diagnose errors.

“Our team quickly learned to utilize patent proofing features provided by Patent Bots,” Morton said. “Patent Bots was easy to learn, and the tool offers many features.”

Pat Finnan, ESF’s Managing Partner, added “Patent Bots is more cost-effective than competing technologies and greatly reduces the time-consuming patent proofreading process. We save money and provide higher quality patents for our clients.”

Over the next year, all ESF attorneys using the former tool had migrated to Patent Bots.

The switch paid off in improved quality.

For example, the firm is most active in USPTO Tech Center 2400 covering networking, multiplexing, cable, and security. The firm’s patent quality ranking in Tech Center 2400 has improved from eighth in 2020 to second in 2022!

“Patent Bots has really impacted how we work here at ESF,” Floam said. “Our attorneys spend less time on tedious patent prosecution tasks and our patents have fewer errors and broader applicability. Thank you Patent Bots!”