The Patent Attorney Ensuring AI Understands Intellectual Property

By David Morris, JD, LLM — 2025-11-20

David Morris spent the first decade of his career at a leading intellectual property litigation practice working on semiconductor and pharmaceutical patent disputes. His work required him to become, in rapid succession, a functional expert in CMOS fabrication, protein folding, and optical networking — because you cannot evaluate patent infringement without understanding what the patent covers, and you cannot understand what the patent covers without understanding the technology.

Where technical fluency is non-negotiable

"IP is the legal domain where technical fluency is non-negotiable," he says. "A generalist lawyer can review an M&A contract. They cannot evaluate whether a software patent's claims read on a competing implementation, or whether a pharmaceutical compound patent's doctrine of equivalents argument holds up. The technical depth required is significant."

Morris joined IXO because he saw AI legal tools entering the patent space with insufficient grounding in technical claim construction — the most important and technically demanding skill in IP practice. His work focuses on claim construction evaluation: testing whether AI tools correctly identify the scope of patent claims across mechanical, electrical, chemical, and software technologies.

The software patent eligibility problem

"The software patent eligibility problem is one I focus on heavily. AI tools are remarkably inconsistent on eligibility analysis. They can recite the correct framework while applying it incorrectly — because the framework requires judgment about what counts as an abstract idea, and that judgment isn't in the text of any statute. It comes from years of reading cases and understanding how courts have applied the doctrine."

Prior art and downstream risk

He also contributes to prior art search evaluation — testing whether AI patent search tools identify the most relevant prior art or miss it in ways that would create invalidity vulnerabilities downstream. "A patent that issues with a prior art problem becomes a litigation problem. The stakes are commercial, not just legal."

Read The Patent Attorney Ensuring AI Understands Intellectual Property on the IXO blog