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.