ClaimMaster 2024.5 adds several new features and improvements to our Office Action response shell tools.
Support for .DOCX OA shell templates
ClaimMaster’s configuration of Office Action response shells previously required storing shells a Word template format (.dotx). To simplify the process of turning any Office Action response into Office Action shell template, we’ve now enabled creation of shells from the regular Word documents (i.e., .docx). When a new shell is generated from such a .docx template, it will be created as a carbon copy of the original Word document, having its replacement fields filled-in by ClaimMaster based on the rejections from the Office Action, a previous claim set, and bibliographic data from Patent Center. If you already have existing shells configured in .dotx format, you don’t need to make any changes. However, the new ability to use .docx templates makes it very easy to turn any new Office Action responses into reusable templates by simply adding replacement fields to your existing documents, many of which can be automatically detected by ClaimMaster.
Fill out any open Word document with biblio and OA data
We’ve also added the ability to fill any currently open Word document with biblio and Office Action rejection data. You don’t need to generate a separate shell when doing this. Any open Word document containing ClaimMaster replacement fields will be filled out with information for the fields when you select the very first “CURRENTLY OPEN WORD DOCUMENT” row in the shells table.
Remove unused sections from the OA shells and other replacement field improvements
ClaimMaster now lets you insert start/end delimiters for various Office Action sections into the template. When a new shell is generated, if no corresponding Office Action data for a particular section is detected in the Office Action(e.g., 101 rejections), the the entire text section encapsulated between those delimiters will be removed from the Office Action shell. This mechanism lets you removed extra sections from the OA shell that do not have corresponding rejections, objections, or allowances in the Office Action. For this feature to work correctly, you need to encompass each section in the corresponding start/end delimiters, as shown below. These delimiters will also be removed from the final Office Action shell when it is generated, regardless of whether content for a specific section is present in the Office Action.
In general, the delimiters for specific OAR sections follow the [OA_SECTION_XXXXX_START] and [OA_SECTION_XXXXX_END] format, where XXX refers to the specific section. For more information about available delimiter fields, please take a look at the online manual.
We’ve also added a few other replacement fields to help with shell generation. These include new [DATE] fields and also the informative [OACLAIMSUMMARYTABLE] field, which can insert a quick reference table into the Office Action shell response with individual status of each claim in the Office Action (including the statutory basis of rejections):
Download text copies of the cited prior art
Office Action tools in ClaimMaster 2024.5 also enable you to download of text versions of the prior art cited in the Office Action. If the “also download Word copies” checkbox is enabled when you download prior art as part of Office Action analysis, you’ll be able to simultaneously access both PDF copies and text copies of the cited references when reviewing any Office Action.
For more information about other improvements in this release, please check out the links below: