Invention disclosures come out of the roadmap review, not out of a form on the intranet

2026-09-28In-House

Practice note, Burbage Law, PC, September 28, 2026

Every in-house patent program has an invention disclosure form, and in most of them the form sits unused, because an engineer has to decide alone that something is an invention before filling it in. Engineers make that judgment badly in a predictable direction: they submit the clever workaround they are proud of and never mention the architectural decision that took the team three months, because to them the second one is simply the design. The programs that harvest well put the patent attorney in the room where the product roadmap is reviewed, have the attorney read the design documents and the largest proposed code changes as they come up for review, and then send the attorney to the engineer with a draft description of what the attorney believes the invention is, asking whether it is right. The form is filled in afterward, by the attorney, and the engineer's share of the work is a forty-minute conversation. Across two decades of drafting for companies from four-person startups to Google and Toyota, this is the difference between programs that filed on what mattered and programs that filed on what happened to arrive.

What it changesFor a company building artificial intelligence products the roadmap review matters more than it does elsewhere, because the inventions sit in the training pipeline, the evaluation harness and the data handling, none of which an engineer thinks of as a product feature, and because the interval between a design decision and its appearance in a published model card or a conference paper can be a few weeks. Budget the attorney's time as a standing hour in the engineering planning cycle rather than as a response to disclosures, and measure the program by how many of the roadmap's major items have a filing decision recorded against them, counting a recorded decision not to file. A quarter in which every disclosure arrived through the form is a sign that harvesting has stopped, not a sign that the engineers have run out of inventions.

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