How Solve Intelligence Expands the Offerings of Small Patent Firms

Small firms are constrained by capacity, not skill

Plenty of the best patent attorneys run small shops or practice solo. The constraint on a one- or two-attorney practice is rarely legal skill. The work happens in sequence, in the hours left after running the business, and pieces of it routinely get sent out, figures to an illustrator and prior art searches to a search provider.

Every one of those handoffs costs money, adds turnaround time, and takes a slice of the matter out of the firm's hands. That is exactly where Solve Intelligence can make a difference. The tasks that small firms have leaned on outside help for are the structured, repeatable tasks AI now handles as a fast first pass, with the attorney reviewing and finishing the work.

Small firms are well placed to move quickly

A small practice can adopt a tool and put it to work on a live matter the same week. That agility is showing up in the numbers. Clio's 2026 Legal Trends for Solo and Small Law Firms report found that 71% of solo practitioners and 75% of small firms now use AI in some capacity, and around 40% of solos plan to adopt AI in the next six months. Smokeball's 2025 State of Law Report found that generative-AI adoption among small US firms and solo practitioners nearly doubled in two years, from 27% in 2023 to 53% by early 2025.

The firms that benefit most approach AI deliberately. Thomson Reuters research found that firms with a visible, structured AI strategy were 3.5 times more likely to see a return on investment than those without one.

Bringing outsourced work back in-house

The most direct win for a small patent firm is reducing what it has to send out. Each capability brought in-house keeps more of the matter with the firm, and removes a step from the timeline.

• Patent figures and drawings: Formal figures have traditionally gone to illustrators, adding cost and a turnaround loop on every application. Solve Intelligence’s built-in Figure Editor lets an attorney generate and iterate on drawings, and easily handle element labels.

• Prior art search: Solve Intelligence's Agentic Search, available across all products, brings a capability historically outsourced to search firms within reach of a small firm. The agent operates directly on patent and non-patent literature, standards, and chemical structures, and drafts the results into a presentable report.

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Widening the services you can offer

Outsourcing less is about keeping existing work in-house. The bigger opportunity is adding services the firm could not realistically offer before. Contentious work has long been the preserve of practices with dedicated search teams and analysts, because it is high-volume and scales badly by hand. 

• Freedom-to-operate analyses: FTO is element-by-element claim mapping against in-force rights, jurisdiction by jurisdiction; classic table work that Solve Intelligence can draft and a practitioner can finish, opening up clearance opinions as a high-value offering (see What Is a Freedom to Operate Analysis, and How Does AI Speed It Up?).

• Infringement detection, invalidity, and claim charts: Mapping claim limitations to prior art, to a potentially infringing product, or to a technical standard is exactly the structured, citation-heavy work Solve Intelligence accelerates, letting a small firm support litigation, licensing, and SEP matters it might otherwise refer out (see How to Build an Invalidity Claim Chart).

• Patent landscaping and portfolio review: Surveying a whole technology area or auditing a client's portfolio becomes feasible when retrieval and summarization across these data sources are automated, turning a research project into a deliverable a small firm can sell.

Why a general chatbot is not enough

A solo attorney experimenting with a consumer chatbot will get useful help with a summary or a cover letter and may conclude AI is "good enough." Patent work is where that breaks down. 

Claim construction, jurisdiction-specific drafting, and element-by-element analysis depend on patent and non-patent literature search, examination guidelines and court procedures. A general model is not wired into any of that, so each piece becomes a separate manual step before its output can be trusted.

This is why purpose-built tooling like Solve Intelligence tends to deliver the efficiency gains, around 3-4x on structured patent tasks, that generalist tools applied to the same work do not. For most firms the two are complementary: a generalist platform for broad office work, and a patent-specific tool for the structurally complex patent tasks.

What Solve Intelligence offers solo and small patent firms

Solve Intelligence builds AI specifically for patent professionals, and the Patent Copilot™ is available to a solo practitioner or small firm just as it is to any firm. That means a small practice can bring more of the matter in-house, across the workflows where small firms feel the squeeze most. It is used by 700+ IP teams allowing:

• Invention Harvesting, Drafting, Prosecution, and Charts in one place: A solo attorney can run a matter from disclosure to filing to prosecution without stitching together separate tools or vendors.

• Figure generation in the workflow: Drawings can be built and iterated alongside the draft, reducing reliance on an outside draftsperson.

• Patent-grade search across every source: Charts draws on search across more than 170 million publications in 107 jurisdictions, alongside non-patent literature and technical standards, with legal status and patent term pulled automatically, putting the reach that unlocks search, FTO, and landscaping services within range of a solo practice.

• Security built for confidential material: Solve Intelligence is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, and ISO 42001, GDPR, and CCPA compliant, with zero-data-retention agreements across every LLM provider, so inputs and outputs are not stored, logged, or used for training. More details are available in the Trust Center.

FAQs

What work can a small firm stop outsourcing?

Mainly patent figures, prior art searching, and first-pass drafting of specifications and claims. Bringing these in-house keeps more of the matter, and its margin, with the firm while shortening the timeline.

Is general-purpose AI like ChatGPT good enough for patent work?

For general office tasks, yes; for patent-specific work like claim drafting, prosecution, FTO, and invalidity analysis, no. It is not connected to the literature search and patent-office data that work depends on, so most firms use both.

Do I have to tell the USPTO I used AI to draft an application?

Under the USPTO's 2024 guidance, there is no specific duty to disclose that AI tools were used in preparing a filing. However, the practitioner signing the paper must have reviewed and verified its contents; relying on the accuracy of an AI tool is not a reasonable inquiry, and the duty of candor and good faith applies regardless of how a document was produced.

Is it safe to put confidential invention details into an AI tool?

It can be, provided the tool is built for it. All firms, irrespective of size, should require zero-data-retention terms so inputs and outputs are not stored or used for training, along with encryption and recognized certifications. Solve Intelligence maintains zero-data-retention agreements with its LLM providers and is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified; documentation is available in the Trust Center.