An inventor sent me a disclosure once. Three things, actually: a PDF of a patent that had inspired them, a phone photograph of a whiteboard sketch, and a voice note that was seventeen minutes lng. The voice note was the most useful part. The photograph had the actual diagram. The PDF was context. None of it was in Word. None of it was formatted. And none of it, frankly, should need to be.
I thought I shall tell him to consolidate it into a single document before uploading. I started typing the instructions. And then I stopped, quite casually, and asked myself: why is this my problem to solve?
One rule. Everything else is yours.
Think about the last time you checked a bag at an airport. The airline had exactly one rule: weight. Twenty-three kilos, or thereabouts, depending on the ticket. Everything else was entirely your business. The bag could be a canvas holdall your grandfather used in the eighties. A rigid Samsonite with a broken wheel. An oddly-shaped guitar case. A bag within a bag within a bag. The shape was irrelevant. The brand was irrelevant. Whether or not the thing looked like a "proper" piece of luggage was completely, entirely irrelevant.
One constraint. Everything else: up to you.
Airlines did not arrive at this design through some profound insight into user experience philosophy. They arrived at it because the alternative, telling passengers which bag type was acceptable, would have turned check-in into a negotiation. And a negotiation before the journey has even started is not an experience anyone wants to have.
"The experience starts before the first word is drafted. If the tool's first message to the attorney is 'please convert your files to PDF format before uploading,' the experience has already failed."
What most tools decided instead
Most patent drafting tools designed the opposite of the check-in counter. PDF only. Word only. One file at a time. And the attorney, who spent years developing legal judgment, who understands prosecution hitsory and examiner behaviour and claim strategy, now spends the first hour of a new matter converting files into an acceptable format before any actual work can begin.
Actually, wait. It is worse than that. The attorney is not usually the person who creates the disclosure. The inventor is. And the attorney cannot control what the inventor gives them. An engineer at a semiconductor company sends a Confluence page. A startup founder sends three voice notes and a photograph of a napkin. A research team at a university submits a pre-print, a data set, and an email thread from six months ago with a correction buried in the third reply. This is not sloppiness. This is how technical knowledge actually lives in the world...
Requiring that to be consolidated into a single formatted document before the tool will engage with it is not a quality gate. It is friction transferred from the tool to the attorney. And the attorney already has enough friction.
The constraint that actually matters
When we built eety's upload experience, the question was simple: what is the constraint that actually serves the patent? The answer was not format. It was information quality. The question worth asking is whether the system understands what it is being given; not whether the wrapping is correct.
A photograph of a whiteboard contains information. A voice note contains information. A CAD screenshot contains information. A pre-print contains information. The format is a wrapper; the thing itslef is what matters. So we built for any format: PDFs, Word documents, images, specs, email exports, all simultaneously. And not just acceptance; document-type awareness. A prototype photograph gets interpreted differently to a formal specification. A prior art document is treated as context, not as description of the invention.
And when information across files conflicts, which it does, more often than anyone admits, eety surfaces the conflict explicitly in the chat. The attorney decides which version is authoritative. The reconciliation becomes a visible, recorded decision rather than a hidden assumption baked into the first draft.
The numbers might be slightly off here, but in early testing: somewhere around sixty percent of comlpex hardware disclosures arrived in more than one file format. The single-file assumption was failing the majority, not the edge cases.
One constraint. Everything else: up to you. That is a complete design philosophy. I got it from an airport. :)