Patent Quality at Scale Starts With the Right Outside Counsel

When handling thousands of cases per yr with a small inhouse team, my primary strategy for ensuring patent quality at scale was to pick trusted outside counsel. I had to trust they focused on issues that I cared about, and I'd spot-check the work. (I don’t think this changes with AI. Spot-checking just becomes checking every draft.) In any event, I always wondered: what problems were still making it into patents when nobody was looking? [numbers below...]