Patent Office Actions
Office actions, read on your own machine
Attach a Patent Center file history. Every Office action in it comes back laid out round by round: each rejection, the claims and statutory ground it names, the references it cites, and the examiner's own words, with every quotation checked against the page it came from.
It reads the record and stops there. It does not draft a reply, an amendment or an argument. See a real reading first, printed unedited.
Free. Runs locally through Ollama, or through your own provider key. Nothing to activate. Why it is free.
The program is Continuation Drafter, the same app patentcontinuation.com describes. Reading a file history is one of the things it does; the others are drafting, critiquing and scoring continuation claims.
The rejection above is written to show the shape, not produced by the tool. A real reading is printed unedited here, including the quotations it could not verify.
Where the file history goes
The file history of an unpublished application is confidential client material, and where it ends up is worth settling before anything else. Here is the whole answer, including the part that is a caveat.
Patent Center delivers a file history as scanned pages. The text on them is recognised by an OCR engine on your own machine, and on the local path the reading runs on your hardware too, so the file is not transmitted anywhere.
That property belongs to the local path, not to the tool as a whole. Point it at a remote provider and the recognised text of the papers it reads reaches that provider, which suits a published application and is a decision you make per matter for anything unpublished.
What it does with an Office action
Four steps, all of them reading, and each one tells you what it could not do.
Sorts the file
A Patent Center "download all documents" PDF names every paper in its bookmarks. From those alone it lists each paper, its date and its pages, and picks out the Office actions, the responses, the claims and remarks filed with them, the Notice of Allowance and the references of record. A paper it does not recognise is kept and labelled, never dropped.
Reads the scanned pages
The pages are images. It recognises their text with an OCR engine on your machine, or uses the text layer of a file you have already run text recognition on. A paper it cannot read says why.
Reports each rejection
For every rejection an Office action states: the claims, the statutory ground, the references applied, and the examiner's sentence it came from. Each quotation is checked against the paper's text and marked verified or not, and a reference the paper does not contain is withheld.
Lays out the rounds
Action, response, claims and remarks, round by round. Where the application was allowed, every limitation of the allowed claims is marked as filed with the application or added in a round of prosecution, and the examiner's stated reasons for allowance are quoted.
Numbers you can check, not logos
A new tool can prove itself honestly in one way: by publishing what it was measured on and letting you disagree with the method.
Reading real Office actions
qwen3.5:9b on a laptop
0 references named that the paper does not contain, across every run
A small study: every Office action and Notice of Allowance in two public file histories, scored against a reading done by hand. It measures how well the tool reads, not how much time it saves you, which we have not measured and so do not claim. The table, the method, and the runs that did worse.
What it does not do
Stated as plainly as what it does, because a page about Office actions is read by someone with a reply to write.
It does not draft a reply, an amendment or remarks. It does not compare your claims with the references, say whether a rejection was right, or suggest how to answer one. It does not assess patentability, novelty or non-obviousness, and it does not docket deadlines.
The USPTO's rules list drafting a reply to an Office action that may require written argument as practice before the Office (37 CFR 11.5(b)(1)), and the reply is signed by the practitioner who stands behind it. The tool gives that practitioner the record, laid out and quoted, and the reading of it stays theirs.
When the next step is a continuation
The same app drafts continuation claims from the specification, and it uses the file history it has just read.
Allowed claims, the limitations added to reach them, and the examiner's stated reasons are the record a continuation is drafted against. The drafting side, its benchmark across 51 models and its free course are described at patentcontinuation.com. To choose a model for your machine, start with set up or what was measured.