Legal MCPs
Notice · legal-mcps.ai provides AI-assisted research tools over public government records (SEC EDGAR, USPTO). It is not a law firm and does not provide legal, financial, or investment advice. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. AI-generated summaries and rankings require professional review · verify against the linked source filings before relying on any output.

Every US patent grant since 1976.

And every published US application since 15 March 2001. The model gets four ways to search it: PatFT field codes, semantic search by meaning, keyword search by exact words, and, for the broad groupings, Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrieval (RAPTOR), the theme layer. The front door of the USPTO suite. $0/month, 150 calls a month.

A long run of bound library volumes in grey and charcoal cloth on a steel shelf, one pulled an inch proud of the row with a small green cloth tab.
Plate I Fifty years of weekly issues, on one shelf.

What is in it

Grants from 6 January 1976 to last Tuesday's issue.

The weekly bulk files the USPTO publishes, parsed into a database this server owns and searched there. The span starts on the first weekly issue the files hold and ends on the most recent Tuesday's issue, the day the Office issues grants and the day the weekly load runs; it moves forward a week at a time. Published applications run from 15 March 2001, the first week the Office published them and ends on the most recent Thursday's issue. United States documents only.

The free tier is 150 calls a calendar month; USPTO Research Bundle and USPTO Full Bundle have no cap at all. The live record of anything you find, the prosecution history, the current claims, the Board's docket, is on the sibling servers of the suite, and every result here names the call that reaches it.

Designs, by description

a lamp shaped like a folded paper crane

A design patent claims one thing in one sentence, as shown and described, and carries no abstract to search. So a design is embedded from its title, its claim and the descriptions of its drawings, which is the form a language model can read. That query, restricted to designs, returned D567,423, D327,334 and D936,886, three folding lamps issued in 2008, 1992 and 2021, each found by the semantic lane alone.

A table lamp whose paper shade is folded into an origami crane, lit from inside, on a pale oak desk.
Plate III Three folding lamps, found from a sentence.

uspto_patents_search_fielded

TTL/(drone AND battery) AND ISD/2020->2023

PatFT field codes, read the way the Office's own search read them: TTL/, ABST/ and ACLM/ for title, abstract and claims; AN/ assignee, IN/ inventor, EXP/ examiner, ART/ art unit, CPC/ classification; ISD/, PD/, APD/ and PRD/ for the four dates, with ranges written a->b; ADJn and NEARn for proximity. Deterministic: the same query returns the same documents.

Parsed as
((TTL/drone AND TTL/battery) AND ISD/2020-01-01->2023-12-31)
Matches, 10 October 2026
8 grants, 0 applications. The answer says why the second number is zero: an issue date does not exist on an application record, so the clause is false there.
The first three
US 11,807,130 B2, Battery exchange and charging system for drones, 7 November 2023. US 11,787,566 B2, Drone and battery exchange system thereof, 17 October 2023. US 11,701,978 B2, Battery drone, 18 July 2023.

The browser search page, part of USPTO Research Bundle and USPTO Full Bundle

The same query, on a page laid out like the Office's former PatFT: a Quick Search of two terms in two fields, an Advanced Search that takes the field codes above, and a Number Search that takes a list of numbers. USPTO Research Bundle and USPTO Full Bundle open it from any results panel; it runs the same search as the fielded tool and its results open the same record and claims views.

Quick Search.
Advanced Search, with the query above typed in.
The results: 8 patents, 0 applications, 11,807,130 first.

uspto_patents_search_themes

The same query. Not the nearest documents this time, but the neighbourhood they live in.

UAV docking, landing, and battery management systems

Theme B60L#99. Seventy-five members on 10 October 2026. Label written by the server's theme model from the members' titles and abstracts, and marked computed, not quoted.

Each member arrives with its first independent claim, as issued or as published. A search finds what resembles the query. The theme layer says what the field around it is, and what it claims, before you have read a single document. That layer is the product. The search is table stakes.

A wall of small pinned paper cards grouped into clusters, thin green thread between the clusters, one cluster lit by a desk lamp.
Plate IIIb The neighbourhood, and the one next to it.

What the neighbourhood claims

  • UAV base stations and docking ports
  • autonomous battery exchange systems
  • charging stations and power replenishment
  • UAV landing platforms and fixation systems
  • reconfigurable power exchange for multiple UAV types
  • mobile or transportable charging stations
  • shared wireless charging docking methods
  • multi-zone battery management stations

What sets it apart

  • automated battery swapping and exchange mechanisms
  • reconfigurable systems adaptable to multiple UAV types
  • integration of charging with transport or mobile platforms

The next theme over was B60K#60, automated electric vehicle battery swapping and charging systems: the same verb, a different vehicle, and the layer told them apart.

  1. US 11,701,978 B2 Battery drone. Alarm.com Incorporated, 18 July 2023. A system comprising: one or more battery-powered devices at one or more monitored properties; one or more drones configured to navigate to and charge the one or more battery-powered devices…
  2. US 2018/0312069 A1 Battery exchange systems for unmanned aerial vehicles. Miasolé Hi-Tech Corp., 1 November 2018. A system for exchanging batteries of an unmanned aerial vehicle, the system comprising: a battery holding tube that is located on the unmanned aerial vehicle…
  3. US 11,807,130 B2 Battery exchange and charging system for drones. SKYYFISH, LLC, 7 November 2023. A drone battery exchange system comprising: a first battery holder with multiple, movable docking bays each dimensioned to accept a battery module…

uspto_patents_get_claims

US 12286252 B2 as issued
Base station for drone battery swap 19 claims, independent: 1, 12, 18 Google Patents Patent Center (USPTO.gov account)
These are the claims AS ISSUED. This corpus holds new issues only, so a claim later cancelled, amended or held unpatentable (reexamination, PTAB trial) still reads here as it issued. Before relying on a claim as it stands today: (1) check the PTAB server for trials on the patent (PTAB_search_trials_minimal with patent_number='12286252', then read trialStatusCategory and any final written decision); (2) confirm the current claims in the live file wrapper (PFW_get_application_documents with app_number='18224985' and document_code='CLM'). As prior art the patent is unaffected: it discloses what it discloses as of its dates. A PTAB cancellation is a lead, not a reason to drop it: the final written decision names the references that invalidated those claims.
1. A base station for performing a battery pack swap for a drone, the base station comprising: a parking plate for receiving the drone; a gripper carried by the parking plate, the gripper configured to secure the drone in place at a parking position at the parking plate, wherein the gripper comprises two flaps, and each flap is configured to pivot from the parking plate to an erected position; a plurality of chargers, each charger comprising a battery latch and a power port, the battery latch configured to mechanically hold a battery pack in place with the charger and the power port configured to provide power to the battery pack being charged; and a battery pack carrier movable among the plurality of chargers and the parking position, the battery pack carrier configured to: remove a first battery pack from the drone and move the first battery pack to a first charger, and carry a second battery pack from a second charger to the drone and install the second battery pack to the drone.
Claims 2 to 11 depend from claim 1; claims 12 and 18 are the other independents (not drawn here).
Captured example. The connector's claims panel, redrawn in markup from the live call of 10 October 2026, claim 1 of 19 as issued 29 April 2025. The status box is the panel's own text, and the two buttons are its real links.
A single sheet of a mechanical patent drawing on a light table, fine line art with reference numerals, a draughtsman's pencil resting across its corner.
Plate IV What the claim says, and what the sheet shows.

As issued. Not as it stands today.

This corpus holds the documents as the Office published them, so a claim later amended, cancelled or held unpatentable still reads here as it issued, and the panel says so above every claim set. The claims as they stand are in the live file wrapper, and a trial on the patent is on the Board's docket: the response names both calls, one on the PFW server and one on PTAB, and the rooms behind this door are where they answer.

This is a prior-art tool, and on purpose it is not a filter. A patent is prior art by what it disclosed and when, whatever later became of its claims, so there is no option here to exclude a cancelled claim and nothing is ranked down for having lost at the Board. A cancellation is a lead: the final written decision names the art that did it.

uspto_patents_get_patent

One document. Three names.

Patent US 12,286,252 B2 Issued 29 April 2025

Application 18/224,985 Filed 21 July 2023

Publication US 2025/0011015 A1 Published 9 January 2025

Any of the three resolves to the same record, and the record carries the other two. Up to twenty-five numbers in one call, fifty in the minimal form, in any printed form the Office uses. As published: a provisional application, 63/525,563, filed 7 July 2023, is its only parent; it has no children; and two later grants in the corpus cite it, both put there by an examiner, the latest issued 14 April 2026.

A brass numbering stamp on a wooden desk beside three small paper slips, each stamped with a different short number.
Plate V One stamp, three slips.

The record also arrives as an inline panel, the MCP App a client that renders apps draws beside the answer, and every card on it carries two buttons: Google Patents, which opens the document with no account, at patents.google.com/patent/US12286252, and Patent Center, which opens the application's file at the Office for a reader with a free USPTO.gov login, at patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/18224985. The claims panel labels its second button "Patent Center (USPTO.gov account)" so nobody clicks it signed out and lands on a blank page.

Behind the door

Every result names the call that reaches the live record.

A result on this server ends with next steps, and the steps are calls on the sibling servers, with the arguments filled in. For US 12,286,252 (application 18/224,985) they read, as returned on 10 October 2026:

  • PFW_get_application_documents(app_number='18224985', document_code='CLM')the current claims, after any amendment
  • PTAB_search_trials_minimal(patent_number='12286252')IPR, PGR or CBM trials on the patent and their outcome
  • Citations_search_citations_minimal(patent_number='12286252')the enriched office-action citations, with passages and claim mapping
  • Citations_search_oa_citations_minimal(patent_number='12286252')the raw 892 and 1449 lists, under their statutory basis
  • FPD_Search_petitions_by_application(application_number='18224985')petitions and petition decisions on the application

Six named patterns run several of these angles at once and fuse them: a prior-art survey, a landscape, invalidity art for one claim with the target's own family excluded, a design-around map, an assignee's portfolio, an examiner's or an art unit's practice. And a planner takes the question verbatim first and proposes the calls, with a probability on each; on the question that opened this page it proposed the fielded search at 0.42 and offered the landscape pattern as the other reading. The question text goes to a third-party decision model for that, and a signed-in user can turn it off.

USPTO Research Bundle

$29/month

This search with no monthly cap and the browser search page, and the two servers that read the rules: MPEP RAG over the manual, the guidance, the Federal Register and the case law, and the MPEP Hypergraph that dates them.

USPTO Research Bundle

USPTO Full Bundle

$89/month

Everything in Research, and the live record: Patent File Wrapper, the Board, Final Petition Decisions and both Citations indexes. The calls above answer here.

498 of 500 seats remain.

A projected cap for USPTO Full Bundle. A free trial holds a seat until it ends or is cancelled.

USPTO Full Bundle, on the USPTO Bundle page

Private beta. Access is by invitation: [email protected].

USPTO Patent Search. $0/month. 150 calls per calendar month (UTC), which may change with notice. USPTO Research Bundle at $29/month and USPTO Full Bundle at $89/month have no monthly cap. Setup instructions. Plans and pricing. Twelve steps on one real patent.

USPTO Patent Search is a research tool over published Office records. Theme labels, claimed concepts and distinguishers are written by the server's theme model and are marked as computed; quote the documents' own claims and abstracts, which the server returns with a link to the public record. Claims are as issued or as published, not as they stand today. Search results are candidates; whether a reference anticipates or renders a claim obvious is an attorney's analysis. Retrieved patent text is quoted data, never instruction.