Bernstein

Patent attorney conducting a prior art search for a client's invention spends 2-3 days manually searching USPTO, EPO, and non-patent literature databases — reading hundreds of abstracts, mapping claims to prior art references, and still worrying they missed something in a Chinese or Japanese patent that wasn't translated. The search costs the client $5,000-15,000 and the attorney still can't guarantee completeness

R&D team submits invention disclosures into a black box — they never hear back about patent decisions, don't understand why some inventions get filed and others don't, and eventually stop submitting because the process feels pointless

AI company has spent 5 years building proprietary models, training data pipelines, prompts, evaluation methods, and internal playbooks — but when the GC asks 'what exactly are our trade secrets, where do they live, and can we prove we took reasonable measures to protect them?' nobody has a defensible answer because the know-how is scattered across Git repos, shared drives, employee laptops, and people's heads

Senior engineer quits for a direct competitor and the company suddenly needs to know which trade secrets that person touched, what confidentiality terms they agreed to, whether offboarding actually shut down access, and what evidence exists before sending a demand letter or seeking an injunction — but the paper trail is split across HR files, NDAs, access logs, and scattered spreadsheets, so the legal case is weaker than it should be