Rowan prosecution is an online tool that automates the generation of Office action shells and other documents and provides tools that improve efficiency and effectiveness in responding to Office actions.

Each year the USPTO reviews hundreds of thousands of patents, from which it generates over one million Office actions: calls to modify, accept, or reject the decisions of a patent examiner. Legal organizations dealing in patent law can receive hundreds of these Office actions every month. That means a lot of administrative and attorney time preparing and reviewing materials for the response.

Paralegals typically spend anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes on each Office action, drafting, formatting, and reviewing response documents (shells), as well as gathering other materials, such as cited art. Patent attorneys then strategize the response—which requires significant time reviewing the examiner remarks in conjunction with the rejected claims and the specific references in the cited art (in many rejections). The USPTO average is about 2.5 Office actions per application, so firms can be processing hundreds, if not thousands of Office actions each year.  

Rowan prosecution automates this process, making it easier and quicker to create Office action response shells. 

To be clear, Rowan prosecution doesn’t replace an experienced patent attorney or paralegal, but it can assist in completing much of the work associated with producing an Office action shell in a more efficient and higher quality manner, enabling the team to focus on higher value work. Over the course of a year, a paralegal working for a busy firm can save literally hundreds of hours worth of time. 

In a side-by-side comparison, veteran paralegals using Rowan prosecution were able to create patent shells five times faster than with traditional, manual entry methods. And that was just to generate the response shells. Rowan prosecution also provides a complete package of documents that help make the responding attorney more efficient and effective in strategizing and writing the response. 

Rowan prosecution uses specialized automation and Natural Language Processing (NLP), to rapidly convert Office actions and current claims into a customized response shell (Word docx file) ready for the technical and legal arguments. In addition to the shell, the package also includes:

Rowan prosecution comes pre-populated with several default templates that can be applied to the Office action response shell. However, Rowan prosecution also has the capability of managing and applying custom templates. 

These templates can be configured to match your preferred fonts, section heading styles, headers, footers, and page layouts. Rowan prosecution also makes it easy to add boilerplate language, including separate boilerplate to be included with particular rejection or objection types.

Rowan prosecution templates are created from Word .docx files, and can carry through nearly all capabilities of the underlying file. Formatting, text styles, highlighting, headers & footers, page numbering, bookmarks, cross-reference fields, etc., are all fully supported.

For more details on custom templates, visit the Rowan Prosecution

Custom Template Capabilities article

Rowan does not store anything processed through Rowan prosecution on our servers, nor do we store any of the results.

Information is encrypted in transit, processed, and the data is delivered back to the browser where the results are displayed.

In order to use Rowan prosecution, you need to have a Rowan account. Rowan has assigned your company a private organization domain—e.g. [firm name].turbopatent.us. The firm name is typically the same as your email domain: between the @ and the .com. 

If you did not receive log-in credentials, please contact your organization’s Rowan administrator or email us at info@rowantels.com.

Rowan prosecution is a cross-platform web application that does not require any additional software or plugins. There is nothing to download. However, you must access Rowan prosecution with the Google Chrome browser. Other browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Edge are not officially supported at this time.

There are two ways to access Rowan prosecution online:

Sign in using your Rowan credentials (email and password) if needed.

This will launch the Rowan prosecution web app and you are now ready to upload or drag and drop your Office action PDF as provided from the USPTO. For published applications, enter the application number.