Patlexa
Legal Services Associate (Graduate)
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About Patlexa
Patlexa was founded to dramatically increase the efficiency of common patent litigation tasks. We combine proprietary software, frontier AI models, and highly-trained human experts to provide bespoke patent litigation services. In addition to our core prior art search and invalidity charting services, we handle complex custom litigation research requests for our clients.
Our service offerings include invalidity charts, prior-art and infringement search, cover pleadings, claim construction presentations, non-infringement reports, and bespoke litigation research. Our users are litigators at major global law firms who depend on our work product being of the utmost quality. The work requires precision, judgment, attention to detail, and the ability to combine legal context with genuinely technical workflows to produce client-ready deliverables.
The Role
The Legal Services Associate is Patlexa's entry-level professional-services role, designed for exceptional STEM graduates with strong coding skills. Patlexa trains successful candidates to become highly-productive legal services experts who deliver complex litigation support work for major global law firms. Our legal services associates use Claude Code, GPT Codex, Python, SQL, and Patlexa's proprietary application in their day-to-day work.
A core part of the role is bespoke legal research: complex custom litigation research requests from our law-firm clients, combining legal analysis with hands-on technical investigation.
Bespoke research requests are open-ended, technically demanding, and highly varied. Typical requests involve searching global patent and technical-literature corpora for prior art relevant to specific claim limitations, analysing patent prosecution histories, investigating how products and their published software actually work (down to firmware-level analysis), reconstructing feature and publication timelines from public web archives, analysing large document sets, mapping patent portfolios against product features, and identifying potential technical witnesses through open-source research. Executing these requests well requires technical depth as well as legal precision.
Successful candidates will also operate and perform quality control of Patlexa's invalidity chart workflows: ingesting and processing source materials, monitoring chart generation, verifying AI-generated citations against original sources, and preparing client-ready deliverables.
The role is suited to a graduate who combines excellent written English, meticulous attention to detail, real coding ability, and the discipline to review complex legal and technical documents carefully. The Associate will be trained in Patlexa workflows, patent litigation materials, invalidity chart structure, citation review, agentic research methods, and the practical expectations of patent litigators.
The Legal Services Associate will work under supervision and will not independently provide legal advice. The focus of the role is the careful execution, verification, and delivery of technically demanding legal research and work product for law-firm clients.
Key Responsibilities
- Bespoke Legal and Technical Research
- Execute complex custom litigation research requests end-to-end under the direction of senior Patlexa consultants: prior-art investigation across global patent and technical-literature corpora, prosecution-history analysis, technical investigation of products and published software (including firmware- and source-level analysis), reconstruction of public-record timelines from web archives, large-scale document-set analysis, patent portfolio mapping, and identification of potential technical witnesses. Deliver findings as precise, fully-cited, client-ready work product.
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Agentic Research Automation
- Use agentic AI tools such as Claude Code and GPT Codex, together with Python scripts and SQL queries against relational databases, to automate and scale research: bulk document analysis, patent-data extraction and ranking, structured web research, and evidence compilation. Verify all AI-generated output against primary sources before it enters client work product.
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Patlexa Application Workflow Operation
- Use the Patlexa application to ingest and process source materials, including asserted patents and prior-art references (patents, technical product manuals, engineering standards, etc.). Ensure that input materials are complete, correctly labelled, and ready for further processing.
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Invalidity Chart Generation Support
- Operate Patlexa invalidity chart workflows from source-material ingestion through to draft chart generation. Monitor each step of the workflow, review intermediate outputs, identify gaps or anomalies, and ensure that chart generation completes successfully.
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Citation and Source Verification
- Review citations in patent invalidity charts against prior art source materials. Ensure that cited text correctly matches the source, including mathematical notation, chemical or technical terminology, Greek alphabet characters, superscript and subscript formatting, paragraph numbering, and figure references. Edit documents to ensure correctness as required.
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Issue Identification and Escalation
- Identify issues during invalidity chart generation and review, including incorrect citations, formatting errors, document-processing errors, and workflow failures. Escalate issues clearly and promptly to technical leads and / or senior Patlexa consultants, with enough detail to support investigation and resolution.
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Client Delivery Support
- Help prepare client-ready deliverables for use by attorneys, ensuring that final work product is accurate, carefully formatted, and consistent with Patlexa quality standards. Support senior team members in responding to client comments, updating work product, and maintaining delivery deadlines.
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Confidentiality and Professional Standards
- Handle client materials, litigation documents, and technical disclosures with appropriate care and confidentiality. Follow internal security, data-handling, and document-management procedures at all times.
Required Skills and Attributes
- Excellent written English and the ability to review dense legal and technical text with precision.
- Meticulous attention to detail and a strong instinct for identifying inconsistencies, omissions, and errors.
- Ability to work carefully with complex Microsoft Word documents, including tables, headings, paragraph numbering, cross-references, superscript, subscript, Greek alphabet characters, and mathematical or technical notation.
- Strong analytical ability and willingness to learn how patent litigation work product is structured.
- High degree of comfort using software tools and learning new legal-technology workflows.
- Practical Python experience — comfortable writing, running, and debugging scripts for data processing and automation.
- Experience with SQL and relational databases — able to write queries against a structured schema.
- Hands-on experience with agentic AI tools such as Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, used for software development or other agentic automation tasks.
- Ability to follow detailed instructions, checklists, and review protocols consistently.
- Ability to communicate issues clearly and concisely to senior colleagues and technical leads.
- Professional, reliable, and comfortable working with confidential client materials.
- Strong academic record in a STEM discipline (engineering, computer science, physics, mathematics, or a comparable quantitative subject).
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Preferred Skills and Experience
- Experience reviewing, proofreading, cite-checking, or editing legal, technical, academic, or scientific documents.
- Familiarity with patents, intellectual property, litigation, legal research, or legal document production.
- Experience working with patent publications, technical specifications, scientific papers, engineering documentation, or standards documents.
- Experience using Microsoft Word for complex document formatting.
- Familiarity with legal technology, AI tools, document automation, or structured review workflows.
- Ability to read technical material carefully, even where the underlying technology is initially unfamiliar.
- Experience working to deadlines in a client-service, professional-services, legal, academic, or research environment.
- Experience with web scraping or web-archive research (e.g., httpx, BeautifulSoup, the Wayback Machine).
- Experience with data-analysis tooling such as pandas, Polars, or SQL-based analytics (e.g., BigQuery).
- Familiarity with Git and modern development workflows (branches, pull requests, code review).
Training and Development
Patlexa trains exceptional STEM candidates with coding knowledge to become highly-productive legal research experts using agentic tools. The Legal Services Associate will receive structured training in:
- Agentic research methods: using tools such as Claude Code and GPT Codex to plan, execute, and verify complex research tasks at scale.
- Python and SQL as applied to litigation research: document processing, patent-data analysis, and research automation against Patlexa's databases.
- The Patlexa application and invalidity chart generation workflows.
- The structure and purpose of patent invalidity charts in US patent litigation.
- Citation verification, source matching, and legal-technical proofreading.
- Common patent-publication formats and patent document conventions.
- Microsoft Word formatting for complex legal and technical documents.
- Quality-control protocols for AI-assisted legal work product.
- Escalation pathways for legal, technical, and workflow issues.
As the Associate develops, the role may expand into greater responsibility for client-facing research delivery, agentic workflow design, internal quality-control systems, and supervision of future junior associates.
Compensation
Competitive graduate-entry base salary, commensurate with the responsibilities of a technically demanding legal-technology professional-services role.
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