What makes a strong invention disclosure

A patent attorney asks five questions to decide whether an invention is worth filing. The strength of your disclosure decides whether each question takes the attorney 30 minutes or 3 hours. SlingIP exists to handle three of the five upfront, so attorney time concentrates on the legal craftsmanship that humans still do best.

Question 1 — What is the invention, in one sentence?

Most inventors describe what their product does. The attorney needs the smallest claim element that's novel. "Our robot detects obstacles in 30 ms" is a product description; "timestamp alignment of event-camera frames with LiDAR returns within 8 ms via a learned offset prior" is a claim element. SlingIP's extraction agent surfaces the novel kernel by element, not by product.

Question 2 — Who else has tried this?

Prior art searches are 60% of the attorney's preliminary hours. SlingIP queries USPTO ODP, EPO OPS, Lens.org, and Google Patents BigQuery in parallel for every candidate, deduplicates by INPADOC family, and presents the top references with a human-verified citation chip. Your attorney walks in with the search done — they spend their hours on the obviousness combinations, not on running the searches.

Question 3 — What's our novelty argument?

For each claim element, SlingIP labels which prior-art reference (if any) anticipates it under §102, and which combinations the examiner could try under §103. The KSR Graham analysis is structured so an attorney can read it in 5 minutes and either agree or push back, instead of starting from a blank page.

Question 4 — Is it eligible under §101?

Software-heavy claims need an Alice/Mayo readthrough; biotech needs Mayo/Myriad. SlingIP runs the vertical-correct §101 agent and returns a risk level (low / medium / high / critical) with the specific test step that triggered the flag. Attorney can keep, refine, or override — but the analysis is done.

Question 5 — Who actually invented it, and is the chain clean?

This is where humans still beat the platform. SlingIP names contributors and flags the exposure cases (prior employer, government funding, AI-tool involvement under USPTO Feb-2024 guidance). The attorney conducts the actual inventor interviews. We surface the questions; counsel asks them.

Of those five questions, SlingIP fully answers questions 2 and 4, mostly answers questions 1 and 3, and surfaces the right questions for question 5. Three of five. The other two cost the attorney less than half their usual time because the structured upstream output makes the human work mechanical.

If you're starting an engagement, the Invention Value Assessment Portfolio (IVAP) delivers all five answers in 90 founder-minutes. Your attorney's first hour starts at "let's discuss the obviousness combinations" instead of "let me read this and run a search."