David Joo, EPA
Written by: 
David Joo, EPA
, 
Legally reviewed by: 
May 4, 2026

Sughrue Mion Integrates Solve Intelligence into Patent Practice

Sughrue Mion has always set the standard for what patent prosecution looks like. Founded in 1957, the firm has obtained more U.S. patents than any other law firm in the world. That record is built on deep technical expertise, disciplined prosecution strategy, and a culture that takes the quality of every work product seriously.

When Sughrue decided to integrate AI into patent workflows for select clients, their approach reflected that culture. Sughrue thoughtfully structured its implementation, and demonstrated a clear vision of where technology and AI adds value and where attorney judgment remains irreplaceable.

Key Insights

  • Sughrue adopted Solve Intelligence's platform for certain clients across Drafting, Prosecution, and Charts following firm-wide testing, culminating in an enterprise partnership.
  • The rollout was driven by Firm leadership prioritising practitioner education and a structured implementation framework from day one.
  • Solve Intelligence is now integrated into numerous preparation and prosecution workflows, helping Sughrue's attorneys work faster, think more expansively, and deliver higher-quality outcomes for a global client base.
Sughrue Mion Integrates Solve Intelligence into Patent Practice

About Sughrue Mion

From its founding in 1957 to today, Sughrue Mion has maintained an exclusive focus on intellectual property law. That focus has produced a remarkable track record for the firm. In addition to having assisted their clients in obtaining more U.S. patents than any other law firm in the world, Sughrue has litigated IP disputes in every major forum, including U.S. District Courts nationwide, the USITC, PTAB, and TTAB. 

The firm is also genuinely international. With major clients across Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Europe, the United States and more, Sughrue operates as a true global IP partner. 

Sughrue, over its lifetime, has attracted talent from all subject-matter areas to provide substantive coverage across virtually any technology domain. The team’s collective experience spans IPR, PGR, covered business method proceedings, reexamination, reissue, and interference, grounded in decades of both prosecution and inter partes practice before the USPTO.

The bar at Sughrue is high. A technically demanding docket, complex cross-border filings, and a quality standard the firm has maintained for nearly 70 years meant that any AI platform under consideration had to demonstrate it could match that level.

Efficient Testing, Clear Decision Making

Before committing to an enterprise subscription, Sughrue put Solve Intelligence through weeks of intensive testing across the firm, head-to-head against other vendors. Practitioners with domestic U.S. prosecution experience and those handling complex international filings both participated, stress-testing Solve’s platform.

The evaluation covered the technology areas that define Sughrue's practice: semiconductor design, pharmaceutical, chemical, cellular and network technologies, software, automotive systems, and more. Attorneys assessed how well the platform handled the technical precision required in claim language, how useful the office action analysis was in practice, and whether the outputs were genuinely improving the quality of the work or just adding noise.

The results were clear enough to justify an enterprise-wide commitment.

“Solve has allowed our attorneys to reduce time spent on routine aspects of patent drafting, prosecution, and analyses, and focus more on higher level strategic analysis.  It allows us to give our clients more thorough, robust, and thoughtful representation for their global patent portfolios,” explained John Rabena, Sughrue’s Managing Partner.

Solve Intelligence in Action

Sughrue's attorneys are now using Solve Intelligence across many of their core workflows.

Response Formulation: The platform summarises examiner rejections, identifies the key grounds of rejection, and surfaces potential counterarguments and prosecution avenues for attorney review. For a firm handling Sughrue's volume and complexity of prosecution work, this significantly compresses the time from receiving an office action to having a structured, attorney-refined response strategy in hand.

Prior Art Analysis: Solve Intelligence provides fast, thorough analysis of cited references, helping practitioners quickly evaluate the strength of examiner positions and identify the most defensible paths to allowance. Given the breadth of Sughrue's technology docket, the platform's ability to engage substantively across diverse technical fields is a true differentiator.

Global Prosecution Workflows: Reflecting Sughrue’s global IP leadership, Solve Intelligence is integrated with local legal texts across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, helping attorneys achieve the same quality of outcomes for their clients across all jurisdictions. From a US appeal brief, to a Japanese office action, practitioners are able to draft work products that meet Sughrue’s exceptional standards.       

Application Drafting Support: Solve Intelligence assists in generating detailed specification language aligned with proposed claims and supporting documentation, helping to ensure proper specification support and consistent terminology across complex applications. This gives attorneys more time to focus on the claim-shaping and strategic decisions where their expertise matters most.

Technology That Keeps the Attorney in Control

Sughrue's integration of Solve Intelligence is not about replacing what makes the firm exceptional. The attorneys at Sughrue have graduate-level scientific training, decades of prosecution experience, and a proven track record of securing some of the world's most consequential patents. What Solve Intelligence does is free those attorneys from the more mechanical aspects of prosecution work, so they can invest their expertise where it has the greatest impact, such as crafting prosecution strategy, anticipating post-grant challenges, advising clients on portfolio positioning, and navigating the realities of multi-jurisdictional filing.

For a firm that has spent nearly 70 years defining what excellent IP practice looks like, that is exactly the right use of AI.

AI for patents.

Be 50%+ more productive. Join thousands of legal professionals around the world using Solve’s Patent Copilot™ for drafting, prosecution, invention harvesting, and more.

Request Demo

Related articles

How Much of Your Patent Practice Should You Codify?

Both in-house teams and outside counsel can let a purpose-built platform carry the shared foundation for their patent work. They can then focus their limited time on the standards and judgment that set their work apart. AI has made this division of labor more valuable by raising the payoff for turning a practice into templates, instructions, and review criteria that run at scale. Let’s call that codification. The platform can encode a great deal of best practice out of the box, and a team can add its own custom templates and instructions on top. The real question is how much to add and how much to leave to the platform. There is no fixed formula because the right balance changes as the team’s practice, the law, and the technology evolve.

‍Key takeaways

• AI has raised the payoff for codifying patent practice. Codification now guides AI-assisted drafting and review directly, not just junior training.

• A purpose-built patent platform can encode a large body of best practice out of the box, so a team can begin with that foundation rather than write its own.

• Solve Intelligence maintains its shared foundation across more than 700 IP teams, keeping it current far more efficiently than any single team could alone.

• The strategic choice is how much of your own practice to codify on top; scarce expert time should go to the standards and judgment that differentiate your work.

• A named professional still signs off on every filing, so accountability for the result never shifts to the AI.

Read Now

How Successful Patent Practitioners Are Putting AI to Work

The most effective patent practitioners are already using AI patent drafting to draft faster, catch claim inconsistencies earlier, and free up hours for the strategic work that actually wins allowances.

Key takeaways

  • AI patent drafting tools can reduce application drafting time by up to 80 percent, with Solve Intelligence customers consistently reporting 50 percent or greater efficiency gains across drafting and prosecution 
  • Roughly 9 out of 10 utility patent applications receive at least one office action rejection, so prosecution efficiency matters as much as drafting speed 
  • Solo attorneys use AI to match larger law firms on turnaround speed and client capacity
  • The strongest reported results come from iterative AI–attorney collaboration, with practitioners directing the process and owning the final work product
Read Now

Adopting AI in Patent Work: A Practical Playbook for IP Teams

Solve Intelligence works with over 700+ patent teams as they bring AI into daily practice, and the same pattern shows up again and again: recognising that AI helps is easy, but building consistent, team-wide use is not. Adoption tends to stall for a handful of reasons, from informal early experiments to unclear decision making, and a promising trial can fade out without anyone establishing whether the tool or the rollout was at fault. This playbook lays out the process that gets a team from first experiment to settled habit, with the attorney's judgment in control at every step.

Read Now

How AI Brings Patent Intelligence Into Every Decision

AI makes it practical to rerun patent intelligence as products and patent rights develop. For example, at concept stage, broad freedom-to-operate screening identifies the rights that merit attention. As the design matures, selected patents are escalated for feature-by-feature claim charts, while scheduled monitoring refreshes the analysis when claims are amended or an application proceeds to grant.

This contrasts with the traditional approach, in which landscapes, FTO reviews, and portfolio analyses were commissioned as separate projects at fixed stages. Each took substantial time to complete and was rarely repeated.

Read Now
Product
Product

By clicking "Accept", you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.

PreferencesRejectAccept
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Preferences