Inside Sterne Kessler’s Software Development Partnership With Clarivate

What You Need to Know

• IP firm Sterne Kessler and software and data provider Clarivate have announced a software development partnership.
• The collaboration is designed to build AI-enabled workflows for processes across the patent lifecycle, beginning with application drafting.
• The collaboration with Clarivate follows Sterne Kessler’s development of a proprietary AI drafting tool and its launch of a claim evaluator with Thomson Reuters.

Washington, D.C.-based intellectual property law firm Sterne Kessler has emerged as a leader in applying generative artificial intelligence-powered tools to patent processes, launching a proprietary patent drafting tool in April 2025 and co-developing a publicly available claim eligibility analyzer with Thomson Reuters that was brought to market this May. Now it wants to go even further.

On Oct. 15, the firm announced a software co-development partnership with Clarivate—a software and data provider for IP practitioners, government bodies and academic users—intended to build AI-supported patent workflows. Workflows developed through the collaboration will be made available to other law firms and enterprises.

The partnership, which is designed to combine Sterne Kessler’s experience and internal AI development efforts with Clarivate’s IP data and software, builds on a history of cooperation between the organizations that has seen the firm provide input on previous products developed by Clarivate and its predecessor companies.

Clarivate president of IP Simon Webster told Law.com that the partnership would provide the company with a deeper understanding of what users need out of IP software, as well as access to existing software for some use cases that it can build off to accelerate its development process.

“They spend time understanding how they want to improve their practice, and then they prototype those solutions internally,” Webster said of Sterne Kessler. “Going forward, that gives us not just a set of problems to solve and an indication of how they want them solved, but an actual prototype that we can then develop full-scale solutions from, with … the level of provenance and trust and durability that the industry needs.”

Webster added that the partnership with Sterne Kessler will help Clarivate build out IPOne, the company’s overarching AI-powered IP platform. IPOne was designed to connect Clarivate’s existing IP offerings and automate some tasks they did not previously address.

For the firm, the partnership will provide the opportunity to continue experimenting with building AI tools that support its attorneys and that it can take to market without having to handle the development and commercialization process on its own.

“We have our own [AI research and development] department, but we don’t want to be in the software development business, so partnering with Clarivate allows us to have the best of all worlds,” Sterne Kessler chief operating officer and executive director Robert Burger said. “Producing fiduciary-grade products is a lot, … so being able to spin off a lot of our tools to them is the name of the game.”

The initial focus of the partnership will be improving the patent drafting workflow within Rowan Patents, Clarivate’s patent drafting and prosecution offering. That effort will draw on work Sterne Kessler has already done to automate parts of the process. Clarivate and Sterne Kessler are targeting the first half of 2027 for an initial release.

“Rowan Patents was developed in a pre-AI era. It was about patent drafting automation,” Webster said. “We’re rearchitecting and rethinking all of these capabilities in the AI era, and this is a great opportunity to do it with an organization that has already spent a huge amount of time thinking about … how to make it effective.”

Burger and Webster said the partnership would work on additional tools intended for use throughout the IP lifecycle, with potential areas of focus including data management and access, filing management and patent litigation.

Going forward, Burger added that working directly with a large IP software provider would offer the firm the best access to new tools to help its clients, many of which are also Clarivate customers.

“What we want to do is to continue to be at the tip of the spear and offer our practitioners and our clients the best representation and the best infrastructure available,” he said. “That’s what this partnership does for us: It allows us to be a step ahead and advising our clients and helping our clients with these really unique needs.”

Originally printed in Legaltech News on October 20, 2026. Reprinted with permission.