I walked into my first IPWatchdog's Women's IP Forum last week expecting some really informative panels and solid networking opportunities. Like all conferences, I was planning to follow my usual routine: take notes on the latest hot topics in IP and then write a blog post about what I’d learned.

Juristat Data Layer is now available inside Solve Intelligence, so patent teams can draft and prosecute against more than 20 years of real patent prosecution history from inside the tool they already use.

By Lauren Bonner, CEO, Juristat. Current as of September 2026. Rejection-rate figures below are drawn from Juristat's USPTO prosecution dataset; date window pending a data-team pull.

Sophisticated competitive analysis that previously required significant time and resources now takes minutes, not days — and is winning pitches.

Customer: Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox. Speaker: Dan Block, Director. Product: Juristat Data Layer (MCP), used inside Claude. Based on a recorded customer interview, August 2026.

Reexam data is now in Juristat. The web app leverages a filterable dashboard. The Juristat MCP server and API so you can reach it from Claude, Co-Pilot, ChatGPT, or your own systems: live in September 2026.

You draft a claim set and want to know one thing: where does this land.

Which Tech Center, which art unit, which CPC class. Get it wrong and you're not just off by a guess, you're setting the wrong prosecution strategy, quoting the wrong timeline, maybe filing claims that were worth rewriting first. Most classification tools answer that question by matching keywords against whatever art happens to be sitting in an index somewhere, and if that index hasn't been updated in years, neither has the prediction.

This fall, in-house IP teams are facing a familiar ritual: pull last year's numbers, brace for a budget cut, and figure out what to trim without gutting the portfolio's real value. On Tuesday, I participated in a IPWatchdog webinar with Gene Quinn and Jason Harrier (AI Patent Counsel, Salesforce) that tackled this exact problem: how AI is reshaping the budgeting and cost-cutting process for 2027, and what teams of any size can do about it right now.

The rules for challenging a competitor's patent have fundamentally changed in 2026. Inter partes review (IPR) petitions have dropped 65% year-over-year to historic lows. Ex parte reexamination has overtaken IPR as the leading post-grant validity tool for the first time since the America Invents Act. Post-grant review (PGR) windows are closing fast, and third-party pre-issuance submissions are drawing renewed attention from IP strategists. If your patent challenge playbook hasn't been updated, it's already outdated.

Notes from the IP Counsel Cafe Silicon Valley Meeting on what AI is actually doing for in-house IP teams: real efficiency, fragmented workflows, and the growing gap between client expectations and firm reality.

It may be more polite to say we’re operating in “uncertain times,” and boy, are they. But the not-so-polite reality is, we’re in a recession. 

Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot owner PSA Group recently announced the terms of a $48 billion merger that would create the world's fourth-largest automaker. A primary reason for the merger is to share the cost of developing electric and autonomous vehicles.