Alejandro Piquer, Intellectual Property Counsel, HP Inc.

"Clerq saves me enormous time on the back-and-forth. Now I spend more of my time on the analysis and judgment, and less on gathering all the evidence used for my final assessment - because Clerq's assessment is a reliable resource for my decision."

Background

Patent Intake in the Age of AI

Alejandro Piquer, IP Counsel at HP Inc., manages multiple patent portfolios, spanning personal systems and consumer applications - a category that has grown to include AI solutions. Submissions arrive from every direction: pure hardware, cloud services, local orchestration of models, devices wrapped around models, edge AI, distributed computing, and everything in between. No one could have deep expertise in all of it, and Alejandro is candid about what that means: the job is to find the invention inside the disclosure, whatever the technology.

For years, the preliminary intake routine was fast. Ten to fifteen minutes per disclosure - digest the submission, run a prior art search, summarize a recommendation for the patent review board. He would then discuss the submission with the patent review board, and a final go or no-go decision was shared with the inventors. In some cases, a follow-up search was needed to cover additional features raised during the assessment.

Then, about one year ago, the disclosures completely changed.

Problem

Finding the Differentiating Features

What used to be a three-to-five-page submission is now a 25-to-30-page document (or multiple documents) often drafted with AI assistance. Submissions became more abstract and more sprawling at the same time, listing endless alternatives and features - the critical feature might sit on page four or page twenty-four. Getting to the heart of each invention took considerably longer, and every clarifying question back to an inventor delayed the final decision. Meanwhile, as the clarity went down, the volume went up, leaving less available bandwidth for the invention intake process.

"A thirty-page disclosure can hide a five-line invention. My job became finding it - and every question back to the inventors delayed the process."

Solution

Stage One: Get Oriented in Minutes, Not Days

Alejandro's approach draws on several parts of the Clerq platform, starting broad. To begin, he attaches the disclosure in Search and generates the query directly from the file - a feature he values precisely because it captures the submission's many alternatives and embodiments instead of forcing him to choose too early. A wide first pass shows him the prior art in the field.

Then he digests it:

• Relevance Analysis breaks down why each reference was surfaced, analyzing each piece of prior art in view of the disclosure, feature by feature.
• Ask Clerq lets him put questions to the documents directly, whatever the invention in front of him calls for (e.g., summarize this reference, explain this passage, does anything in the result-set disclose a particular feature).

"I'm not an expert in all technologies that cross my desk - nobody could be. Relevance Analysis and Ask Clerq get me up to speed with unfamiliar features within minutes."

An initial assessment comes together in minutes. After reviewing the results, he gathers the two or three closest references and an inventor-ready summary of what the submission actually covers. He sends those references to the inventors with the analysis attached - this feature appears in this document, and here is the passage. When the inventors come back identifying what they believe is genuinely novel, the real work begins.

Stage Two: The Agentic Workflow Supports the Analysis

This is where Clerq's agentic patentability workflow takes over - under Alejandro's direction at every step.

He starts the process with the same disclosure, attaches the references he found previously in Search as known prior art, and refines the key features so they cover exactly what the inventors identified as differentiating. Nothing is searched that he didn't scope; the workflow pauses for his review before it proceeds. Terms are then defined so the system reads them as intended, citing directly to the supporting materials. Then Clerq runs the search, generating multiple queries across each of the selected features.

What comes back in less than five minutes is a claim chart with every feature mapped against every reference - disclosed, partially disclosed, or not disclosed - with each reasoned conclusion citing the exact passage behind it, one click away. He navigates element by element across the references, filters to the most critical disclosures, builds a defensible position on novelty and non-obviousness, and reviews the combinations Clerq identified, prioritized around the references that most closely map to each feature.

"The chart shows me, feature by feature, what's disclosed and where - with the passages to back up every conclusion drawn. That level of analysis used to be assembled by hand, reference by reference - putting together an evidence-based complete assessment used to take me a long time."

The analysis then becomes the conversation. Alejandro shares Clerq's assessment with the inventors as the basis for his recommendation - this feature is disclosed in this document, for this reason - and the discussion becomes more focused and evidence-driven. Instead of spending time preparing a complete assessment for the inventors, Alejandro can focus on collecting the inventors’ feedback on the points of differentiation, which results in better IP support.

The Impact: More Time on Judgment, Less on Manual Review

By using Clerq, Alejandro can put together a complete analysis for the invention, which considers all the assembled evidence and the inventors’ feedback. After everything is discussed and confirmed with the patent review board, inventors receive transparent, cited references along with the reasoning behind the decision rather than a bare ranking. Alejandro reports that inventors appreciate this complete assessment. Even when the outcome is a decision not to file, the inventors come away having a better understanding of where their invention could be distinguished. The back-and-forth that used to stretch across days now happens once, with a complete analysis including the evidence and reasoning clearly documented.

"It saves me enormous time on the back-and-forth. I spend more of my time on the search and the judgment, and less on putting together a summary of the findings - because Clerq's assessment includes enough evidence to support my decision. At the same time, inventors spend less time digesting the content of findings and more time flagging differentiating features"

Alejandro selects the combination of Clerq capabilities the submission calls for. For the lengthy AI-drafted disclosures that have become the new normal, it gets him to the differentiating features faster and lets him give submission a complete review, however complex the document.

"Clerq hands me the references and the basis for its reasoning so I can focus on the judgment. The inventors spend less time on the back-and-forth, and more time discussing the technical distinctions that matter for their invention, and I can provide better IP counselling to the R&D teams I support."

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