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The pilot outcome

5–10 hours

of low-value or unrecovered preparation targeted across ten suitable matters.

A clearer day-one client experience.

A better-prepared first attorney review.

Professional control unchanged.

Pilot target—not a published Barker Brettell saving.

Put yourself in the client’s shoes

Imagine I’m the founder of an AI-enabled medical-device company.

What I have
  • Investors are interested
  • A live demonstration in two weeks
  • Prototype results and technical files
  • Employees and contractors who contributed
What I do not know
  • What is actually protectable
  • Whether I have disclosed too much
  • What the attorney needs from me
  • What the first stage might cost

The reality

My files contain the story. They do not contain the answers.

1

Technical evidence

Prototype results, system drawings and a working description of what changed.

2

Commercial pressure

A website teaser next week and a public demonstration already in the diary.

3

Ownership gaps

A contractor built the optical housing; the assignment wording is unclear.

4

A possible disclosure

An architecture screenshot sat on a public GitHub issue for three hours.

Where time goes

Professional judgement gets trapped inside reconstruction.

Before useful review
  • Find the latest version
  • Reconcile dates and contributors
  • Separate fact from founder assumption
  • Work out what is missing
Patent-practice evidence

Incomplete disclosures create more meetings, consultation, iterations and drafts.

Sources in presenter notes: McAfee & Taft; Saul Ewing (2024)

What the data can—and cannot—say

The cost is visible. This exact slice has not been measured.

38%
average legal utilisation: roughly five hours of an eight-hour day unbilled

General legal benchmark. Not patent-specific, and not all unbilled time is waste.

1,500
median annual billable hours for IP partners in AIPLA’s 2022 data

US IP-practice context—not a measure of intake reconstruction.

No public figure
isolates the hours patent attorneys spend repairing weak intake

So the saving is a pilot hypothesis, not a borrowed statistic.

Clio Legal Trends 2025 · AIPLA Economic Survey 2023 public extract

The product

One intake becomes a reviewable, evidence-linked first pass.

01 · Collect

Client context

Guided questions plus the files they already have.

02 · Check

Missing facts

Technical, ownership and disclosure dependencies become visible.

03 · Cite

Exact evidence

Every suggested issue opens the relevant passage in the source.

04 · Decide

Human control

The attorney accepts, edits or rejects—and controls scope and fees.

Value from day one

The client feels progress before the first meeting.

Instead of
  • “Send us everything”
  • Repeated requests for basic facts
  • No visibility on urgency or next steps
  • A quote built on avoidable assumptions
They receive
  • A clear picture of what is complete
  • Focused questions they can actually answer
  • Urgent dates surfaced early
  • A better-informed route to scope and price

Change perspective

Now I stop being the client.

This is what Carrie sees before the first substantive review.

Value for the attorney

Reclaim work that is hard to bill—without automating judgement.

01

Start prepared

Technical, ownership and disclosure facts arrive in a structured first-review pack.

02

Inspect evidence

Open the exact source passage behind every suggested issue.

03

Apply judgement

Accept, edit or reject each point; retain control of legal advice, scope and fee.

04

Improve intake

Record which suggestions helped so the firm’s question set improves over time.

Pricing transparency

The portal shows a starting range—not an all-in fee.

What informs the range
  • Likely patent, design and trade mark workstreams
  • Markets and filing route under consideration
  • Urgency, evidence quality and missing information
  • Visible assumptions approved by the attorney
What remains professional
  • Hourly, fixed, capped, blended or retainer structure
  • Scope changes and complexity judgement
  • Official and overseas-agent costs shown separately where relevant
  • The final engagement and client-facing estimate
Indicative range → attorney review → agreed fee arrangement
Barker Brettell publicly offers flexible fee structures agreed with the client for cost certainty.

Live demonstration

Aurelia Lens has exactly the gaps the portal should catch.

Fictional mixed-IP matter

Wearable surgical visualisation system. Synthetic documents only. No client data.

Possible public GitHub disclosure before a planned live demonstration

Contractor-developed optical housing with unclear assignment

No systematic prior-art search and an incomplete contribution record

The measurable hypothesis

Thirty to sixty minutes per matter is the test—not the claim.

5–10 hours
of low-value or unrecovered preparation across ten suitable matters

Some preparation is billable, delegated or professionally necessary. The pilot measures what actually changes.

01

Time to the first useful triage decision

02

Number of client follow-up loops

03

Time to verify each cited finding

04

Suggestions accepted, edited or rejected

30–60 minutes is an explicit pilot hypothesis—not a published benchmark.

The ask

Ten matters.
Four weeks.
Your rules.

I built the working demonstration in one week. The day-one benefit is visible now; the firm-specific advantage needs your judgement and more time.

Decision requested Carrie, choose the three facts you most often have to recover before useful first review.

If the portal creates more checking work, stop. If it produces a better starting point, co-design the next version.

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