We constantly keep up with technology to better serve our clients. It is just as important to understand how AI benefits this firm and our clients, and how AI puts our clients at risk. This is how our firm chooses to use AI, and how we choose to NOT use AI. The firm uses artificial intelligence in several very strategic and intentional ways. If you order a trademark clearance search from me, I run it through the US Patent & Trademark Office’s best-in-class AI-powered search engine. I’ve compared it with the leading paid services and found it even more intuitive, intelligent and trustworthy, and with far less noise. The new system uses “a stronger industry-standard search syntax and offers both a simplified, basic search interface as well as a more advanced search interface for more complex searching.” For logo and image searching, which the PTO does not yet offer, I have found nothing better than Markify.

If you receive my periodic “wacky patent” emails, I am 100% writing the content, but AI magic in my customer relationship management software marks the email as personal to you and gets it past your spam filter. I love you all, but I can’t write 400 individual emails in a day.

We freely use ChatGPT to help us write the general “background of the invention” sections of our utility patent applications. We NEVER, EVER enter any proprietary client information into a search engine of any kind. Not your drawings, not your confidential specifications. NEVER. You just never know where that information is going. The “detailed description of the invention,” the patent claims? Those come from me and me alone.

What else do we NOT use ChatGPT for? We do NOT use ChatGPT for legal research. It may surprise our clients that I do not know all the answers! I DO know how and where to find the answers. We often refer to our PLI Intellectual Property Answer Guide as a starting point. Yes, an actual physical book. We invest in an updated version every year so we stay current. We subscribe to MBHB Snippets®, Patent Docs, the TTABlog and Dennis Crouch’s Patently-O Daily to monitor changes all across patent, trademark and copyright law, as they happen. And for more in-depth case law research, there’s no substitute for an “old-school” Westlaw search. The Cook County Law Library down the road lets me use it for free.

We got your back.