Researchers had done what researchers are supposed to do. They had made progress, gathered evidence and published their findings. By the time they came to Kristin Havranek, Founder and Partner at Antheros, they were building a company and thinking about investment. Their science had moved forward but their patent protection had not kept pace.

There was an earlier application filed by the university, a subsequent paper describing further advances, and newer research beyond both. Havranek’s job was to work out what could still be protected, where, and how that protection would support the product the company wanted to bring to market. All this with a ticking clock.

That commitment to helping inventions reach people, shaped the way Antheros was built. The firm was founded by Sabrina Poulos, Kristin Havranek and Stephanie Dusaban Gonzales, who had worked alongside one another for more than a decade, first at Wilson Sonsini and then at Goodwin Proctor. Their combined decades in traditional law firms had taught them what excellent patent counsel could achieve. Starting their own gave them the freedom to ask: “If we were starting from scratch, how would we build a patent firm worthy of the innovators we serve?”

For Poulos, now Managing Partner, building an AI-native firm meant rethinking the incentives around the work. If technology could reduce the hours needed for a task, attorneys needed the freedom to use that time for the client’s benefit. An annual billable-hour target would give them little incentive to embrace that change. Hence, she removed the requirement, giving the team greater freedom to use the time AI freed up to explore a client’s technology, work through strategic questions and strengthen their advice.

“I didn’t want a billable hour requirement,” she says. “I’d long thought that that disincentivizes being efficient for the client.”

Choosing a Tool

Choosing technology to support that approach took experimentation. Poulos wanted tools that would give an experienced team more scope to investigate, question and advise. When a client mentioned using Ankar in-house, the team decided to investigate. They tested it over 30 days. By the end of the trial, the attorneys had found a place for Ankar in their daily workflows and felt confident making it part of how they worked.

For Gonzales, one revealing test involved roughly 300 sequences from more than 60 antibodies. Ankar completed the analysis in 30 seconds, with a result she assessed to be about 99% correct, saving several hours of work. She reviewed the output before using it in a claim. The value went beyond speed and time savings: identifying the share features and variations across those antibodies helped her consider broader protection, rather than claims confined to individual sequences that a competitor might more easily design around.

For Bonnie Choi, an Associate whose practice focuses on chemistry, the value emerged while using Ankar to prepare a response to a patent examiner. The examiner had relied on a passage in a lengthy reference to support a rejection. Ankar surfaced another passage in the same document that contradicted that position, with a citation that took Choi directly to the source. She verified the finding and used it to challenge the examiner’s reading, strengthening the argument for her client’s invention.

For Antheros, the ambition is to be closer to the decisions that shape an invention’s future. More regular portfolio analysis, closer attention to the science and better-informed client conversations all serve the same purpose: helping a company make sound decisions while its invention is still taking shape.

Looking ahead, Gonzales hopes scientists and patent attorneys will work more closely, with fewer delays between a discovery and a conversation about its implications. Bringing those questions forward gives the team a greater opportunity to support the growth of these companies. With Ankar supporting the analysis and preparation behind that advice, Antheros’ attorneys have more room to do the work that drew them to the profession: understanding an invention’s potential and helping its creators realise it.

For Havranek, Ankar helped solve the problem she had faced at the start. She was able to bring the original patent application, the subsequent publication and the latest research into one place, trace where each development had come from and identify what had changed, with citations back to the source. From there, she could focus on the question that mattered: what could still be protected, and how that protection could support the company being built around the science.

For Antheros, that is what using AI well looks like: not replacing the judgment of the attorney but giving them more time and better evidence to understand how an invention is evolving and help its creators decide what to do next.