patent-audit

legal-skills

Replace billable hours with markdown files and an AI that actually follows them.

This repository is a public, executable playbook for U.S. utility-patent work. Not a chatbot wrapper. Not a "talk to a lawyer" landing page. A set of agent skills — SKILL.md files, checklists, examiner/adversary protocols, intake questionnaires, and deterministic Python — that make a language model do the work a patent boutique currently invoices at several hundred dollars an hour.

The goal is not to "assist" counsel. The goal is to displace legal fees. If an inventor, founder, or in-house engineer can run a 316-item pre-filing audit, a simulated USPTO prosecution loop, and an adversarial design-around attack without opening a matter, that is a win. If a firm that used to charge $18,000 to draft and file a utility application is now competing with a checkout of this repo and a model that costs less than lunch, that is also a win.

Lawyers who are good at judgment, strategy, and courtroom work will still have work. Lawyers whose product is walking a known statute, filling known forms, and billing the walk — this repo is aimed at that product.

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This is not legal advice

Read this before you use anything in this repository.

This project is not a law firm. It does not create an attorney–client relationship. Nothing here is legal advice, a legal opinion, a patentability opinion, an infringement opinion, a freedom-to-operate opinion, or a representation that any application will be allowed, valid, enforceable, or commercially useful.

• These skills do not file applications, do not sign inventor declarations, do not submit Information Disclosure Statements, do not contact the USPTO, and do not appear before any tribunal.
• Outputs are AI simulations grounded in 35 U.S.C., 37 CFR, the MPEP, current official USPTO texts the agent is instructed to re-fetch, and whatever facts you put in the intake. Models hallucinate cites, miss art, and invent confidence. The scripts exist because models also cannot count, cannot do date arithmetic, and will report "all numerals consistent" after finding 19 of 20.
• Fee amounts, form names, PTO mechanics, and §101 case law move. The audit checklist is a primary-source pre-filing checklist — statutes, rules, MPEP, and current Office practice — not a substitute for the official text. The examination and workaround skills require the agent to refresh statutes, rules, MPEP pages, and examination memoranda on every run. Verify those sources yourself before you rely on a result.
• Some acts remain reserved to a human with the right credentials: signing a declaration under penalty of perjury, making the ultimate duty-of-candor / IDS materiality call, recording an assignment, paying the PTO, and anything that requires a registered practitioner. The skills refuse to do those things without your separate, explicit authorization, and even then they will not pretend they are you.
• You own the consequences. A bad claim set, a missed statutory bar, a false entity-status claim, or an omitted material reference can destroy rights. If the stakes are high enough that you would sue someone over a missed deadline, hire a registered practitioner and use this repo as the thing that makes that person cheaper, faster, and harder to snow.

The GPL-3.0 license already disclaims warranty. This paragraph is the same idea in English: use at your own risk.

That disclaimer is required because the work is real enough to hurt you if you treat it as magic. It is not a retreat from the pitch. The pitch is that most of what you were paying for was process, and process belongs in files.

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Why markdown, not a firm

Patent work is already a document pipeline:

1. Facts that are not in the draft (disclosure dates, inventorship, entity status).
2. A specification and claims that either enable the invention or do not.
3. A search that either found the dead-ringer or did not.
4. An examiner who will reject under 35 U.S.C. 101 / 102 / 103 / 112 until the claims are allowable or you give up.
5. A competitor who will keep the value proposition and drop the limitation you accidentally treated as essential.

Firms wrap that pipeline in scarcity, letterhead, and a rate card. This repo unwraps it.

The files are the product. If a better model ships next quarter, the same files get cheaper and sharper. If the PTO changes a form, you edit a markdown file instead of waiting for a CLE.

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What's here

Three skills. They are designed to be run in order. Each one is a complete agent skill: a SKILL.md the orchestrator reads as its contract, plus the payloads, templates, and scripts that keep the model honest.

legal-skills/
├── patent-audit/         Pre-filing audit. 316 checklist items. Deterministic pre-pass.
├── patent-examine/       Recurrent simulated USPTO examination until two independent examiners clear the same version.
├── patent-workaround/    Adversarial design-around testing. Strengthen only what is supported and patentable.
├── LICENSE               GNU GPL v3
└── README.md             This file

Suggested pipeline

     inventor facts + draft
              │
              ▼
      ┌───────────────┐
      │ patent-audit  │  Is this even fileable? Stop on statutory bars.
      └───────┬───────┘
              │ ranked defects + parsed.json
              ▼
      ┌───────────────┐
      │patent-examine │  Mock prosecution. Amend only after a simulated OA.
      └───────┬───────┘
              │ version-locked "allowable" candidate
              ▼
      ┌──────────────────┐
      │patent-workaround │  Can a competitor keep the value and miss the claims?
      └────────┬─────────┘
               │
               └── iterate examine ↔ workaround until two examiners
                   and two adversaries clear the same packet

patent-examine and patent-workaround will use patent-audit's parser and mechanical checks if that sibling skill is installed. A prior audit is not a substitute for examination. A prior examination is not a substitute for workaround testing.

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Install

These are agent skills: a directory with a SKILL.md the model is instructed to follow. Copy the three skill folders into the skills directory of whatever agent you run.

On Windows, from this repo:

Copy-Item -Recurse .\patent-audit, .\patent-examine, .\patent-workaround $HOME\.grok\skills\

Then tell the agent, in plain language:

• Use $patent-audit to audit this draft before I file it.
• Use $patent-examine until two fresh examiners independently find the same version allowable.
• Use $patent-workaround to pressure-test this draft against credible design-arounds.

Python 3 is required for the scripts. The audit parser accepts .txt, .md, .pdf, and .docx. PDF needs PyMuPDF; .docx needs python-docx. Missing optional dependencies fail loudly instead of silently producing a h