Thomson Reuters announced Wednesday a first-of-its-kind partnership with Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox to launch their generative artificial intelligence-powered Patent Claim Eligibility Analyzer for law firms and in-house legal teams.
Thomson Reuters and Sterne Kessler began working together in 2025 to build the tool based on Sterne Kessler’s patent litigation strategy and Thomson Reuters’ case law repository.
Steve Assie, general manager of global and large law firms at Thomson Reuters, told Law.com that this kind of collaboration was a first for the company.
“We started to have a conversation about the AI tools that the firm has been developing. … Ultimately, it’s led to this agreement. A first for us at Thomson Reuters to co-develop tools with a firm, bring them to market, jointly leveraging the expertise of the firm … and the fiduciary-grade AI that we at Thomson Reuters have access to,” he said.
The Patent Claim Eligibility Analyzer, available in CoCounsel Legal, uses semantic analysis and case law data to evaluate patent claims based on Section 101 of U.S. Code Title 35, which governs inventions’ patentability. The tool analyzes claims for vulnerabilities such as a lack of precision or a lack of precedent supporting the patent’s defense.
Dan Block, director in Sterne Kessler’s electronics practice group, said the firm has been able to develop its own method to evaluate patent claims, which can otherwise be a challenging and lengthy process.
“The reason why [Section 101 is] important is because it’s really a way to either win your case early or lose your case early because people are often filing motions to dismiss. It’s also challenging to get it right, to really be able to know one way or the other how a court might rule,” he said. “To win one of these motions, you really need to find the best federal circuit cases that you can then analogize to your claims, and then once it finds the most relevant cases, which is most of the battle, then it’s about analyzing it. That’s what we’ve worked with Thomson engineers to help develop, embedding that practice that we use at Sterne Kessler in writing these types of motions.”
In CoCounsel Legal, a large language model-agnostic platform, users can place their claim directly in the Patent Claim Eligibility Analyzer, which will then ask the user if the claim is tied to a general or abstract idea and if it adds meaningful technical improvement. The tool will then search a set of roughly 200 curated Section 101 cases to start, with reasoning as to why certain cases were given for the submitted patent claim. Users can verify the citations linked to Westlaw thereafter.
Although other patent and intellectual property-focused legal tech providers like Patlytics and Solve Intelligence have also developed patent analysis tools, Block said that, historically, there have not been many tools available to that can evaluate patent claims thoroughly enough for Section 101.
“There have been tools in the past that deal broadly with 101, but the way that they work is they work in more of a heuristic fashion. … They look at the words that are in your claim and then based on the words that are in your claim, they make an assessment on whether your claim is going to be held eligible or ineligible under 101,” he said. “The problem with that approach is it doesn’t really take into account the reality of what the case law is that’s out there.”
While this is Thomson Reuters’ first time co-developing a tool with a law firm, the company has been involved in several other kinds of collaborations recently. The announcement of the Sterne Kessler partnership comes about a month after Thomson Reuters announced partnerships with Supio and Hotshot in April.
Supio users can now access Westlaw Advantage through the Supio platform to leverage features including Deep Research, AI-powered jurisdictional surveys and a litigation document analyzer. Hotshot is providing four courses to law students, which cover AI foundations, professionalism and business skills, civil litigation basics and an overview of transactional practice to provide students with lesson content and hands-on experience using AI legal tools.
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