Our patent processing tools are designed to work with different patent attorney styles.  You should not need to change your drafting style to use Patent Bots.  Here, we describe our expected formats for patent documents.

Patent Applications

We are only able to process Microsoft documents in XML formats (.docx, .pptx, and .vsdx). If your Word document has a .doc extension, please save it as a .docx file.

We expect the following order in your patent application:

• Title — We use the first non-empty paragraph as the title. If you have a header page, then we may have an incorrect title.  This won't affect our proofreading and drafting tools, but it is important have the correct title for our Art Unit Predictor.
• Specification — All paragraphs up to the beginning of the claims section are included in the specification.
• Claims — We identify the start of your claims section by looking for a paragraph with only the word "Claims" or a phrase like "What is claimed is:" (any capitalization). All paragraphs until the abstract section are included in the claims.
• Abstract — We identify the start of the abstract section by looking for (i) a paragraph "Abstract" or "Abstract of the Disclosure" (any capitalization) or (ii) a non-numbered paragraph after a page break.

We have tried to accomodate different styles of practice, but if your style differs from what we expect, you may get an error. If you do get an error, please contact us for assistance at support@patentbots.com. We may be able to update our processing to accommodate your practice.

A few items to note about how we process your documents:

• the/said — If your claims use "said" as in "said widget", we will change "said" to "the". This improves our accuracy in processing your claims.
  Comments — We allow you to include comments in the claims, e.g., to share with inventors. All paragraphs in the claims that start and end with "***" in the claims section will be treated as comments and ignored.
  Track Changes — Track changes are treated as if they had been accepted in your Word doc.

Office Action Responses

We can process your office action response with or without your specification.  The content of office action responses is more varied so we look for the start of your claims and the end of your claims.

• Start of Claims — We search for the first paragraph of your office action response that looks like a claim. To avoid mistakes, we only look for a claim with a claim status indicator (e.g., "Currently Amended") so you'll get an error if your claims don't have status indicators.
• End of Claims — For the end of your claims, we look for typical section headings (e.g., "Remarks" or "Amendment to the Specification") or a paragraph after a page break that doesn't look like a claim.

Claim Sets

We can also proofread just a set of claims. For example, you may draft a set of claims and want to proofread them before writing the specification or you may be working on a continuation application.  We treat any document that doesn't look like a patent application or an office action response as a claim set.

For claim sets, we find the first paragraph that looks like a claim, and we ignore all text before the first claim.