Stay Up to Date on the Latest News and Events from SLW
The 3 Modes of AI Use and Which One to Avoid
How you work with AI matters more than how much you know about AI. The mode to watch out for is the one where you review the AI’s output closely but look at the wrong things. Overview A July 2026 Harvard Business Review article, Shaping Early-Career Success in the Age of AI, by Agarwal, Barua, […]
AI in the Patent Office: What In-House IP Teams Should Know Before Examination Changes the Record
Patent offices are moving AI from experimentation into search and examination support workflows. For in-house IP teams, the practical response isn’t more automation for its own sake; it’s to strengthen prosecution readiness before filing so applicants can make the most of earlier, better-informed examination. For the last several years, most conversations about artificial intelligence and […]
Inside the Hub-and-Spoke
Inside the Hub-and-Spoke: How Attorneys at SLW Build Their Own Tools Most law firm AI initiatives are central teams shipping tools to the rest of the firm. SLW Labs is structured the opposite way, and the structure is the point. There is a familiar pattern in how large organizations approach internal innovation. A central team […]
Introducing SLW Labs
Introducing SLW Labs: Why We Built the Tools, and What Comes Next After years of evaluating third-party AI drafting tools in production, what we observed is that the most distinctive value comes not from third-party tools, but rather from building our own tooling based on how our patent attorneys actually practice, the firm’s prosecution expertise, […]
Are Fake Papers Prior Art?
TL;DR Because cited non-patent literature (NPL) may be increasingly AI-generated, patent practitioners should examine NPL more closely and develop enablement-based strategies for challenging questionable references. Overview A recent Harvard Kennedy School study¹ on AI-generated scientific papers infiltrating Google Scholar raises important considerations for patent attorneys and IP counsel regarding prior art rejections under § 102 […]
AI Patent Law: Navigating the Future of Inventorship
—By Lucas Hjelle, with Contributions from Nathan Elder. As a patent attorney experienced in transformer-based AI architectures and large language models (LLMs), I want to share insights on the evolving landscape of AI-assisted inventions. This is particularly relevant in view of the 2024 publication of the USPTO’s AI Inventorship Guidance (“Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions,” […]