Prosecution Analyser

Patent prosecution histories are fragmented across office actions, attorney responses, amended claims, register communications, and procedural documents. This makes it time-consuming to understand how a case developed, why amendments were made, and which prior art or examiner objections shaped the final claims. For attorneys, that initial review can absorb hours before any substantive legal analysis begins, adding cost for clients and slowing strategic decision-making.

This app turns publicly available prosecution-history documents into a structured case report. It filters out low-value material, identifies key communications, tracks claim changes, and presents the amendment history in a clear, digestible format. It helps patent attorneys quickly understand the story of a case, including competitor applications, examiner arguments, key prior art, and amendment rationale, supporting faster assessment of issues such as opposition strategy.

The prototype is fully funcitonal and can be used with any PDF documents downloaded directly from the EPO website. For future improvements, the user will be able to type in an EP patent application number and then the app will pull the key documents directly from the register for analysis.

Core purpose Turns fragmented European patent (EP/EPO) prosecution files into a structured, readable case story — so an attorney can quickly understand how a case developed, why claims were amended, and what prior art shaped them.

Document handling Upload prosecution PDFs — drop in the full EPO file wrapper; no need to weed out admin documents first. Automatic filtering — discards low-value material (fee payments, acknowledgements, powers of attorney) so only substantive documents are analysed. Document classification — identifies EPO file-wrapper types: claims, amended claims, replies, the (extended) European Search Report, search opinion, Art. 94(3) communications, Rule 71(3)/161/162, summons, and decision to grant. OCR for scanned PDFs — image-only documents are detected and read via vision OCR, with the recovered text cached. Analysis & insight Executive summary — a plain-language narrative of the whole prosecution, framed for an EPO paralegal (EPC articles, novelty/inventive-step objections, stages). Prosecution timeline — every key event in order: filing, search report, search opinion, replies, examination communications, intention to grant, grant. Claim sets by stage — see the claims as they stood at each stage, with amendment/cancellation counts. Track Changes (redline) — a word-level diff between any two stages (green added / red removed) with per-claim status badges: Amended / Unchanged / New / Cancelled. Independent claims summary — full claim text plus a colour-coded category badge (composition, method, apparatus, etc.). Cited prior art — per-case table of cited references (D-codes, EPC basis X/Y/A, claims affected, stage, examiner notes), de-duplicated so one document keeps its D-label across stages. Portfolio-level views Analysis dashboard — total cases, total prior-art references, average references per case, and a prosecution-stage distribution across the portfolio. Portfolio prior art — every unique prior-art document across all cases, showing each case it was cited against (including the same document shared between cases). Reporting & navigation Printable case report — a clean, print/Save-as-PDF report (summary, key facts, independent claims, timeline, cited art). Deep-linkable views — tabs and the claims redline can be reached directly by URL (just added this). About / How-to page — built-in guidance on using the tool. Conventions UK English throughout, no emojis in the UI, light theme. Built on a contract-first stack: Express API, React + Vite frontend, Postgres + Drizzle, OpenAPI codegen, and the Replit OpenAI integration for the AI analysis.