Walk into any intellectual property conference in 2025, and you’ll hear one topic echoing across sessions and expo halls: artificial intelligence. 

As a patent professional, you may feel at the mercy of the USPTO, especially at the end of  the quarter or fiscal year, also known as their incredibly busy season. As you’re facing an influx of office actions or are still buried in an especially complicated IDS, you may be looking for ways to simplify your day and streamline your processes. 

With so much going on in the world during the first half of 2020 — a global pandemic, an economic recession, and widespread protest movements — developments in the intellectual property sphere have largely flown under the radar. But that does not mean 2020 has been bereft of patent news.