You pay for every hour of your outside counsel's time while they draft your office action responses. The examiner sends back a rejection. It goes to your outside counsel's firm, an associate researches the references and writes the argument, and the bill comes to you at full rate whether the rejection was novel or one your outside counsel has answered a hundred times. Most of what you are paying for is not judgment. It is the hours of research and drafting that sit underneath it.

Those hours are real. A manual office action response typically takes an attorney three to eight hours to prepare and every one of them is billable. Across a portfolio with a steady stream of actions, drafting time is the line item that quietly runs up outside counsel spend.

ArcPrime's office action response program changes what you are paying for. Instead of your outside counsel building each response from scratch, the program pairs you with counsel partners who run the response through ArcPrime's AI office action service. The AI does the research and the first draft. For every rejection where a claim is amended, it produces multiple argument options, each checked against the specification for support and delivered with citations. For a prior art rejection, it explains why it chose the main argument over the next best one, and it flags the examiner's weakest mappings, the places where a reference has been stretched to reach a limitation it does not really teach.

With ArcPrime's office action response system, the partner lawyer's job shifts to the part that actually needs a lawyer: reviewing and editing that work instead of writing it. The research, the first pass at the argument, the citation pull, all of it arrives done. So the lawyer spends under two hours per office action on review and refinement, not a full day of drafting from the examiner's letter. The judgment still comes from a human. The hours of setup do not.

That shift shows up on your invoice. Companies using the program are saving up to 50% per action compared with what their outside counsel had been charging them. They are no longer paying for research and drafting hours that the AI now handles. You get the same reviewed, ready to file response, from real counsel, faster and for meaningfully less.

None of this means an unreviewed machine filing on your behalf. Every response is read, edited, and signed off by a partner lawyer, and every amendment traces to the specification, because an argument with no support in the record is worse than no argument at all. The program removes the expensive part of the work and keeps the accountability.

Office action volume is not going down, and outside counsel hourly rates are not either. The question is whether you keep paying full price for the research and drafting behind every response, or move that work to a program where AI handles it and a partner reviews it. To see what the office action response program would do to your cost per action, book a conversation.