NAPP Webinar: AI-Enabled Patent Filing Strategies: Rolling Provisionals, Provisional Netting, and Cluster Filing

Description

Most inventions can be legitimately claimed several ways — as a control system, a networked architecture, a signal-processing method, a device — and public USPTO data shows those framings carry materially different prosecution profiles. Acting on that was never affordable: at the USPTO's own estimate of forty hours per application, a client could fund one framing, and testing a second meant prosecuting the first to failure and filing a continuation. Agentic AI drafting changes that arithmetic, taking a filing-ready application from weeks of production to hours of judgment — every strategy in this session depends on it. Those strategies are rolling provisionals, many-to-one provisional netting, and cluster filing of non-provisionals with mutual incorporation by reference, pursuing alternative claim framings in parallel rather than serially. We cover the mechanics, the benefit-claim construction that makes or breaks the approach, the client-side economics, and the duties attaching to AI-assisted drafting, with recorded demonstrations.

Learning Objectives: After attending this session, participants will be able to:

• Assess how agentic AI drafting changes the production cost and timeline of a filing-ready application, and identify the professional duties that attach to its use under 37 C.F.R. § 11.18(b)
• Describe rolling provisional practice and many-to-one netting to preserve priority across a group of filings while concentrating prosecution spend in a single case
• Construct a cluster filing of non-provisionals, including the incorporation-by-reference and benefit-claim decisions that determine whether members receive independent examination
• Apply a framework for selecting which cluster member to prosecute and for handling the remainder — including the publication consequences a client must knowingly accept — and weigh the economics of parallel claim development against serial prosecution and continuation practice

About Paximal: Paximal is an agentic AI patent-drafting platform built by patent attorneys and technologists for practitioners at firms and in-house teams. The platform takes an invention disclosure to a filing-ready application under attorney direction, with the practitioner setting claim focus, terminology, and embodiments at defined alignment checkpoints. Paximal also operates Idea Clerk, a founder-facing intake product that delivers structured invention disclosures to counsel.

Speaker: Ian C. Schick, Ph.D., Esq. is Co-Founder and CEO of Paximal and a pioneer of AI patent drafting. In 2017 he founded Specifio, the first commercial automated patent-drafting platform. He previously practiced as a patent attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Carr & Ferrell, representing technology companies and venture-backed startups, and holds a Ph.D. alongside a technical background in physics and engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. Ian is a Stanford CodeX Fellow, where he led the Machine-Generated Legal Documents project, founded the AI Subcommittee of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, and is a perennial IAM Strategy 300 Global Leader.