How Dilworth IP Uses AI to Elevate Patent Drafting Quality and Strategic Depth
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Executive Summary
Dilworth IP—a boutique patent firm known for its senior-attorney-only model—faced rising pressure common across the IP industry: fixed-fee billing, growing workloads, and increasing client expectations for both speed and quality. Rather than viewing AI as a threat, the firm saw an opportunity.
Founder & Managing Partner Michael P. Dilworth recognizes AI’s inevitability in patent practice. As he put it during a webinar, “AI is positioned to dramatically impact the legal industry in ways that are entirely unforeseeable.”
Over two years, the firm evaluated multiple AI patent drafting tools before selecting DeepIP as its primary AI drafting system. Today, AI doesn’t replace attorney expertise—it amplifies it. DeepIP helps Dilworth IP uncover broader embodiments, improve consistency, strengthen claim strategy, and deliver deeper applications within fixed time and budget constraints.
In a moment where patent portfolios are under more scrutiny than ever, Dilworth captures the shift succinctly: “It’s a golden age of understanding the value of each individual patent asset.”
Profile at a Glance
About Dilworth IP
Dilworth IP is a senior-attorney-only boutique firm specializing in patent drafting, prosecution, IP strategy, and litigation support. With a diverse, global client base and deep technical expertise, the firm delivers high-quality, strategically grounded patent services across industries ranging from engineering to life sciences.
The Challenge: A High-Expertise Firm Under Structural Pressure
Dilworth IP’s structure is unusual in the patent landscape: every application is drafted exclusively by senior patent attorneys, each with decades of technical and legal experience. It’s a model that prioritizes rigorous thinking and seasoned judgment over volume or hierarchy, and it has enabled the firm to produce exceptionally strong work for nearly 20 years.
Dilworth explained that therein lies a cultural challenge as well: asking attorneys who have worked the same way for decades to suddenly adopt new systems—especially AI—is inherently difficult.
Four industry-wide shifts drove the firm’s move toward an AI patent drafting tool and, ultimately, DeepIP:
1. Fixed-fee constraints vs. quality expectations
The patent industry has been moving steadily toward fixed-fee pricing for years, and Dilworth IP is not immune to the resulting financial pressure. As Dilworth put it, “There is this constant downward pressure on pricing in this industry.”
Yet expectations for drafting depth, embodiment coverage, and technical clarity have only increased.
IP Counsel Ryan Schneer, who joined the firm in March 2025, reinforced the challenge of balancing these competing forces. “A lot of the clients work on fixed budgets…which creates tension between cost and quality.”
This tension magnified the importance of tools that could expand attorney capacity without diluting the work.
2. Early AI tools were not good enough
While expanding the team could have alleviated some of the firm’s drafting pressure, Dilworth believed that headcount was not the right answer. “Before we think about adding headcount, maybe we can turn to AI.”
Dilworth IP tested multiple AI drafting tools—both general-purpose LLMs and sector-specific platforms. Schneer, one of the firm’s earliest AI champions, had already experimented extensively with GPT-based enterprise setups during his time running a solo practice.
Schneer explained that when those tools were tested against real drafting workloads, they lacked patent-specific training, resulting in unpredictable outputs, and earlier patent tools tended to be formulaic, limited to rephrasing user input rather than reasoning about technical context.
The issue wasn’t just inconsistency—it was a fundamental lack of legal and technical inference, something patent drafting relies heavily on. Attorneys found themselves correcting the AI rather than accelerating through the drafting process.
3. Clients began expecting AI-enabled workflows
Another shift pushing the firm toward AI adoption came not from the attorneys, but from the clients themselves.
Dilworth noted that clients were starting to inquire about the firm’s AI capabilities because they themselves were already using AI-enhanced tools. As AI tools became more common in R&D, engineering, and legal teams inside large companies, expectations around outside counsel began to shift as well.
Clients wanted faster turnaround, richer drafts, and more competitive pricing—and increasingly believed AI should play a role in enabling this. In some cases, they wanted to ensure their outside counsel wasn’t falling behind their internal processes.
The message was clear: AI was becoming part of the baseline expectation for sophisticated IP work.
4. A need to maintain competitiveness
As the volume of patent filings grows and attorney workloads intensify, tools that enable deeper coverage and stronger applications become a competitive differentiator. For Dilworth, keeping pace with technical complexity and global filing demands required more than experience and expertise—it required leverage.
“Staying current is staying relevant.”
In his view, attorneys who resist adopting AI risk losing their competitive edge as clients increasingly seek efficiency, completeness, and consistency.
For a senior-attorney-only firm, the risk was even higher: without junior staff to absorb drafting volume, AI became the only viable lever for scaled capacity without sacrificing quality.
Why DeepIP: Choosing the Right AI Partner in a Crowded, Noisy Market
When the firm finally tested DeepIP, the difference was immediate. It wasn’t just a drafting assistant—it was a system designed around the realities of patent practice, the constraints of fixed-fee work, and the expectations of seasoned attorneys. Several factors ultimately made DeepIP the right long-term partner.
1. Enterprise-grade security built for patent workflows
In the early days of AI adoption, confidentiality concerns across the industry were significant. Patent applications often contain unpublished inventions, sensitive roadmaps, or proprietary scientific breakthroughs. For a firm like Dilworth IP—with a global client base spanning biotech, pharmaceuticals, engineering, and advanced manufacturing—robust data protection was non-negotiable.
DeepIP’s security architecture—isolated tenant environments, encrypted data flow, and strict controls ensuring that client material is never used for model training—offered a level of security comfort that many earlier tools lacked. This gave the firm confidence to integrate AI into workflows that touch sensitive, unpublished innovations.
2. Vendor stability in an overcrowded and volatile AI market
During the firm’s evaluation process, Dilworth attended an AI-focused industry event where another participant mentioned something startling: 28 new AI patent tools had entered the market in just 12-18 months.
For Dilworth, vendor stability was essential. The firm needed a partner with the financial strength, technical roadmap, and long-term vision to outlast the coming consolidation.
DeepIP stood out specifically because of its investment backing and operational runway. As Dilworth explained, the company had the necessary capital to “achieve escape velocity”—and more importantly, to keep building in a fast-moving, competitive landscape.
3. Customization and flexibility tailored to senior attorneys
Unlike many firms, Dilworth IP does not rely on junior attorneys to generate first drafts. This makes the quality and adaptability of AI output especially important. Senior attorneys need tools that respond to nuance, technical specificity, and stylistic preferences.
DeepIP’s customization became a defining factor. Attorneys could iterate in natural language, shape the tone and structure of their specifications, and modify prompts to reflect the firm’s drafting style.
Dilworth emphasized that this flexibility set DeepIP apart, noting that the platform offers “tremendous discretion on how to use it.” Rather than replacing attorney judgment, DeepIP amplified it—allowing experts to bend the tool to their workflow instead of bending their workflow to the tool.
4. Training and onboarding designed for time-constrained experts
At Dilworth IP, training new tools internally is more resource-intensive than in a typical firm structure. Every hour of onboarding is an hour diverted from high-value client work. As a result, ease of adoption and quality of vendor training were critical.
On this front, DeepIP again distinguished itself. Dilworth highlighted the importance of effective instruction, saying: “Stellar training—super, super critical.”
From the attorney side, Schneer confirmed that onboarding was intuitive. He found that DeepIP’s interface and workflow felt natural from almost the first session. He was productive after just one or two attempts—a rare level of ease for a sophisticated patent drafting tool.
Together, these factors made DeepIP not only the most powerful option tested, but also the most viable for long-term adoption.
How DeepIP Is Used Today: From Drafting Assistant to Quality Multiplier
Once the firm fully integrated DeepIP into its drafting process, the platform quickly became more than an auxiliary tool—it became a central element of Dilworth IP’s quality, strategy, and workflow architecture.
What stands out most from both Dilworth and Schneer’s accounts is that DeepIP made the work product itself more comprehensive, consistent, and strategically valuable.
1. Building more comprehensive patent specifications
One of the most transformational outcomes has been the expansion of technical breadth within each application. DeepIP helps automate the brainstorming layer—surfacing new phrasing, structural options, configurations, and variations that strengthen coverage.
Dilworth described this repeatedly, noting that DeepIP enabled the inclusion of subject matter “that ordinarily wouldn’t have been considered at the drafting stage.”
For a firm operating in industries where competitive protection depends on anticipating variations and design-around strategies, these expanded embodiments are not merely additive—they materially improve claim strategy and long-term enforceability.
DeepIP became a catalyst for idea generation, enabling Dilworth IP to move from good to comprehensive, strategically future-proof specifications without adding more attorney hours.
2. Higher-quality applications within the same drafting window
Despite the industry narrative that AI will immediately and radically reduce drafting time, Schneer emphasized that at Dilworth IP the biggest initial ROI has been quality.
He articulated this shift clearly: “At a given constant amount of time, the quality is much higher,”
and that he’s able to “write longer and more robust, more detailed applications in the same amount of time.”
This directly addresses one of the firm’s biggest pressures: delivering high-quality applications within fixed-fee constraints—without compromising detail or depth.
3. Seamless Microsoft Word integration that protects existing workflows
For senior attorneys accustomed to crafting applications directly inside Microsoft Word, most exclusively browser-based AI tools create friction. DeepIP’s Word add-in eliminated this adoption barrier entirely.
Schneer described the integration as “a big plus” because it allows him to stay within the same drafting environment he has used throughout his career. It also lets attorneys:
- Iterate on paragraphs in place
- Refine text without switching windows
- Maintain formatting and structure
- Collaborate across desktop and cloud workflows
This “work where you already work” approach significantly reduced onboarding time and made it possible for even historically tech-resistant attorneys at the firm to feel comfortable adopting AI into their daily practice.
4. High-quality drawing generation that replaces tedious manual work
One of the most unexpectedly impactful features for Dilworth IP has been DeepIP’s drawing generation and interpretation tools. Patent drawings are often a bottleneck—especially system diagrams, workflows, and architectural schematics that must be both technically precise and visually consistent.
This single capability can save attorneys hours normally spent sketching by hand, outsourcing drawings, or reworking unclear diagrams from inventors. It also enables attorneys to iterate on figures and descriptions simultaneously—ensuring alignment between drawings and written embodiments.
For a high-efficiency, senior-attorney practice, cutting manual drawing time has immediate and meaningful impact.
Results & Impact
What's Next
Dilworth IP sees its current AI adoption not as an endpoint, but as the foundation for a more comprehensive, more integrated future. As Dilworth described it, “We’re probably in the first inning.”
Both he and Schneer believe the next stage of transformation will come not from simply increasing use of today’s tools, but from enabling more autonomous, context-aware, and end-to-end workflows that reduce repetitive prompting and allow attorneys to focus on the highest-value analytical tasks.
DeepIP is already serving as an anchor tool from idea to enforcement for many of Dilworth IP’s workflows. The next step is expanding this collaborative layer across the full team.
“It’s a golden age of understanding the value of each individual patent asset.”
The firm’s next phase is not about replacing lawyers with AI—but about equipping highly experienced attorneys with tools that allow them to deliver deeper coverage, faster insights, and more strategic applications.
And as the technology matures, both Dilworth and Schneer believe AI will become part of the backbone of modern patent drafting—quietly embedded, deeply integrated, and essential to competitive practice.