A randomized trial finds artificial intelligence drafting help improves patent drafts, and that only experienced lawyers keep the improvement

2026-09-09Research

David H. Autor, Tanya Rodchenko, Josh Martin, Zanna Iscenko, Scott Strand, David Pearl and Melissa Ferere, “Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 35720 (September 2026)

One hundred thirty-three patent lawyers at eleven United States intellectual property firms were randomly assigned access to an artificial intelligence drafting tool for ninety days. Blinded patent attorneys scored the resulting work on enforceability, technical accuracy, strategic ambiguity, completeness and clarity. Access raised the quality of benchmark drafting work by 0.34 standard deviations at ten days and 0.38 standard deviations at ninety days, with the larger gains going to junior lawyers. When the tool was withdrawn, the lawyers who had used it still outperformed the control group by 0.32 standard deviations, but that advantage sat entirely with the senior lawyers, at 0.45 standard deviations. Junior lawyers showed no average improvement on unaided judgment tasks, and their scores spread out rather than rising: fewer middling results, and more that were either poor or excellent.

What it changesThe measured gain is real, and it is largest exactly where the supervision burden is heaviest. Two things follow for anyone running a patent program. A quality figure produced under this design is a figure for supervised output, so the attorney review that produced it belongs in the budget rather than being treated as the cost the tool removes. And the people whose drafts improve most are the people least able to work without the tool afterward, which makes tool access a staffing and training decision rather than a procurement decision.

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