After a few years in-house, I started to worry I'd lose my sharpness as a drafter.

Outside counsel reps you constantly. You draft patent after patent, get hammered by office actions, see your work tested. In-house, the volume drops and the drafting muscles soften. You get better at other things like strategy, business judgment, and working with engineers, but I had to give up something I'd once spent years agonizing over every detail of.

So during COVID, I started recording a patent course. Partly to remember what I knew, partly to force myself to keep the skill sharp. The premise: *How to write a patent in 20 hours.* That was my budget as a young associate at Fish. Every patent, looking at the clock.

Six years later, I just crossed 500 students on Udemy. (Closer to 1,000 if you count a Teachable migration, but the platform switch nuked my stats.)

Many thousands of hours of billable experience, distilled into a $40 course. And at this point AI has probably gobbled it up already, so you can find most of it with enough prompting on ChatGPT.

70 lectures, 2.5 hours of material, and 37% of students finish the whole thing. I thought this was unexpectedly high given the dense material.

The legal concepts haven't aged. But, the timeframes have.

Practitioners using AI tools today are reporting around 30% time savings. I think that number goes higher with the right setup, as people learn that prompting is its own skill and the models keep getting better.

So the next version probably isn't *How to Write a Patent in 20 Hours.* It's *How to Write a Patent in 5.* Hours? Minutes?

Everyone is waiting to see what's possible.