“Rowan Patents has cut my drafting time in half.”

Sheema Khan is a Patent Agent, currently working at Kinaxis and previously at Stratford Managers Corporation. She holds a B.Sc in Chemistry from McGill, and both an A.M. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard. She conducted post-doctoral research at MIT and McGill, before joining a start-up pharmaceutical company, where she was the inventor on a number of patents. She is also a writer for the Globe and Mail and a TEDx speaker. Over the past 20 years, she has drafted patents in many fields, such as pharmaceutical, chemical, biological, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, business methods, and now mostly software applications.

The Business Challenge

Before being introduced to Rowan, Sheema used Microsoft Word and PDFs to draft her patents. She estimates that it would take from 30 to 40 hours per application. Then at Stratford she was introduced to Rowan Patents by a colleague. “Once I tried it, I loved it. It’s like going from a standard transmission to an automatic.”

Sheema says that Rowan’s integrated drafting environment has cut her drafting time in half and gives her the versatility to make changes. She believes that Rowan allows her to spend more of her time on higher value tasks and provides flexibility to add new elements and not have to worry about reference numbers.

A Secret Weapon to Work Smarter

At Stratford, Sheema had a client in litigation with another operating company. The client wanted to invalidate the asserted patents, so Sheema put the asserted claims into the Rowan drafting tool and asked for an Information Disclosure Statement, which provided her with prior art that had not been cited by the Examiner.

She says “It was fantastic. Some of the art we are using in IPRs for obviousness or novelty objections. It helped us to find art very quickly and easily.”

For the same client, Sheema had drafted several software patents. Once issued, the firm handling their litigation told her client that they were amongst the best software patents they had ever seen. Sheema attributes this to Rowan; it enables her to focus on higher level tasks that would have taken twice or three times as long otherwise.

“I think our clients benefit because they get a really good solid patent application. Rowan Patents frees me up to read current case law or recent developments in law and that affects what I draft.”

Changing Jobs, But Not Patent Drafting Software

When Sheema moved from Stratford to her new position at Kinaxis, she requested that Rowan Patents be a part of the deal. “I indicated that I have used the solution and it cuts down on the time I need to draft fulsome patent applications. It will save us money both in the short term and the long term and provide us with better patents.”