Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A. (SLW), one of the nation’s leading intellectual property law firms, today announced the public launch of SLW Labs, the firm’s internal innovation platform for building proprietary tools that support patent prosecution and strategic portfolio management. SLW Labs operates on a hub-and-spoke model: a small core team maintains shared infrastructure for security, governance, and platform integration, while attorneys, staff and technologists across the firm build domain-specific workflows on top of it.
Several SLW Labs products are already in production. ARTY, SLW’s proprietary AI-powered patent drafting and review platform, is in active use across the firm’s prosecution practice. The IDS Reference Review Tool, built by SLW attorneys and technologists, streamlines the management of Information Disclosure Statement references for prosecution teams.
Additional SLW Labs products are in development or planning. SimProf, a simulation environment that trains attorneys in patent prosecution judgment through realistic scenarios, is a working prototype and will be deployed as part of the 2026 summer clerkship program. SIDA, a tool that streamlines the invention disclosure process, is also in active development. SAGE, a Strategic Advisory and Guidance Engine designed to inject portfolio-level context into prosecution decisions, and SILO, a next-generation intelligent document organizer being developed in-house, are in advanced planning. Underpinning all of these is SLW Sandbox, the firm’s shared infrastructure for attorney-led tool building, including a structured agentic-coding program (Explorer, Builder, and Deployer tiers) that gives qualifying attorneys access to enterprise coding tools, per-project resources, and a path from MVP to production.
SLW continues its strategic partnership with Black Hills AI (BHAI), through OTTO Hub, an enriched data source based on SLW docking data, and OTTO IP, an AI drafting tool, are licensed at the firm.
“We started as one of the earliest firms to evaluate and adopt third-party AI drafting tools in production. Through countless hours of evaluation, we observed that the most distinctive value comes not from third-party tools, but rather from building our own tooling based on how our patent attorneys actually practice, the firm’s prosecution expertise, quality standards, and docket structure encoded in the systems themselves. SLW Labs is how we build that.”
— Lucas Hjelle, SLW Labs
“The hub-and-spoke model is the choice that makes the rest possible. A small core team holds the platform and the standards, security, governance, the shared infrastructure, so that attorneys, staff and technologists across the firm can build domain-specific workflows safely on top of it. That is how Labs ships continuously rather than in a single release, and it is how the standards stay uniform across every product we put in front of an attorney or a client.”
— Nathan Elder, SLW Labs
SLW Labs is supported by an external development partner working under SLW direction, particularly on integration with the firm’s existing platforms and systems. The firm’s IT group, led by Tom Ernster, owns the infrastructure layer; Anup Suresh, who heads SLW’s security and compliance program, governs the security architecture across all Labs products. Hard rules apply across the platform: no client data enters public AI models, every AI-generated work product receives substantive attorney review before filing or delivery, and full audit logging covers document access and AI interactions for every matter.
“The point of building SLW Labs is to focus attorney attention on the legal judgments only attorneys can make: claim strategy, prosecution posture, inventor relationships, and portfolio architecture. The tools handle scaffolding so that strategic work expands.”
— Andre L. Marais, AI Adoption Lead, SLW
SLW will publish a multi-part editorial series on slwip.com/slw-labs/ over the coming months covering each of the Labs products in detail, ARTY’s quality, security, and prosecution-specific design; SimProf’s role in training the next generation of strategic IP advisors; and SILO’s approach to intelligent document infrastructure built in-house.
About Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A.
Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner (SLW) is one of the nation’s premier intellectual property law firms, focusing exclusively on patent prosecution and portfolio strategy. Founded in 1993, the firm has obtained more than 61,000 U.S. patents for clients ranging from early-stage innovators to Fortune 500 technology companies. SLW is ranked Tier 1 nationally for patent law and has been recognized by IP Stars as highly recommended for patent prosecution for five consecutive years. The firm maintains offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Silicon Valley, California.
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