Are professional guidelines making Patent Attorneys too cautious on AI?

As I write this, the FTSE 100 company Relx’s share price has declined 50% in six months. Although Relx may be unfamiliar, its company Lexis Nexis is well known in the legal sector. And in this case, the market fears might be correct; 2026 is set to be the year of AI for patent attorneys. But there’s a complicating factor, especially for European patent firms. The epi issued professional guidelines on the use of AI (“AI Guidelines”) that patent attorneys must follow in their work. The epi is the professional body for European Patent Attorneys and covers 14,4351 qualified European Patent Attorneys. I’m going to take a look at some of the key points of the AI Guidelines2 from the epi. I’ll show how it is just the start and I’ll explain why Hybrid Intelligence is the future.

AI, surely that just makes stuff up

Many European patent attorneys view these AI Guidelines as an additional barrier to the use of AI. The AI Guidelines understandably focus on risk and some European patent attorneys use them as a reason to resist AI completely.  But that misses the point. The AI Guidelines are a starting point to ensure AI is used responsibly and without jeopardising valuable IP.

We’re all aware of high-profile AI fails; hallucinated case law and quotations from documents that don’t exist. Generative AI does have risks, and those risks can result in work which isn’t just low quality, but negligent. And here’s where an open mind on the AI Guidelines helps. They aren’t a barrier but a set of guard rails representing a minimum for an acceptable service.

To excel with AI, you must do more than just use AI and follow the AI Guidelines. At EIP, we have Hybrid Intelligence, where the combination of attorney and AI is genuinely better than either alone. I know this from experience, new ways of working with AI are improving my work products.

To give an example, a couple of years ago, I posted on LinkedIn how an AI patent search had found me a relevant patent in minutes. It became one of my most viewed posts, helped by a debate about how AI could not compare to a carefully crafted Boolean search in full text.  The undertone was clear that AI was somehow inferior, despite providing faster results than was possible before.

So, let’s look at some of the AI Guidelines in more detail and see how they are just a starting point for EIP’s Visser AI service.

Client permission is required using AI on client work. (Guideline 4)

I’ll start with this because it’s arguably the point which has the greatest impact. It’s vital that clients know AI is being used and agree to its use. But the underlying message is that AI is a shortcut and some time-pressured patent attorneys might try and sneak it in to get something done more quickly. It’s set the conversation up the wrong way round.  What about all the many clients who want their patent attorneys to leverage AI to improve work products and outcomes?

That’s the motivation behind our Visser AI service, which responds to the market demand for patent attorneys to use AI. We know that many clients want their attorney to use AI. And those clients are sophisticated, they want to see a reduction in cost and a fantastic work product. Hybrid Intelligence can deliver that by the attorney working with AI in ways that were not previously possible.

Patent Attorneys must check the output of AI. (Guideline 3b)

Frankly, this should be a given, although the legal horror stories show how that often isn’t the case. Again, we see how the underlying feeling is that AI will make mistakes that prejudice the client. If you have to check the work, how can it possibly be any better than just doing it yourself in the first place?  

This is where Hybrid Intelligence comes in, of course we check the output but we also apply our judgement and know-how to influence the AI for the best results. It’s not a case of prompting and reading the answer to make sure it’s free of hallucinations but understanding why that answer was given and using that understanding to enhance the results.  AI is not intelligent in the human sense, but it can certainly appear so.  By understanding this and using it to our advantage, we can get amazing results.

Any AI used for patent work cannot retain client data and cannot use client data for training. (Guideline 2a)

Protecting confidential information is central to life as a patent attorney.  EIP has had an ISO27001 accredited Information Security Management System in place for many years to support this. We have annual training on best security practices. Even without this in the AI Guidelines, I’m sure every attorney would not dream of allowing client information to be inadvertently disclosed.  

But few people understand just how much data AI services can and do use. Many people don’t understand that their data is retained and used for training AI behind the scenes. Take Gemini, for instance.  You can only get true zero data retention with an enterprise subscription; a paid subscription alone does not provide this guarantee.

Specialist Patent AI can guarantee zero retention, but sometimes a combination of AI tools can give even better results than is possible with other services. EIP’s Tech and AI team have been at the forefront of this assessment, ensuring a suite of tools is available with zero data retention. For example, it won’t be long before AI agents are preparing and filing patent applications at patent offices.

The AI Guidelines are a starting point, not a barrier.

So, the AI guidelines are not a barrier but a minimum standard. Clients will increasingly expect more. Visser AI’s forward-deployed patent attorneys are already pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, exploring new ways of working to improve results and efficiency.  This is more than a library of prompts.  To give an example, we know how context influences output so we control context for the best results.

Get in touch with Laurence Brown, if you’d like to learn more about Visser AI and Hybrid Intelligence, we can show you how it can improve outcomes and allow your patent budget to go further. It’s all fully compliant with the AI Guidelines and takes it to the next level.

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