ClearstoneIP Integrates Workflow-Native AI into the Clearstone FTO Platform with Launch of FirstPass™

FirstPass delivers AI-generated analysis within the structured review environment helping IP teams cut FTO review time by 50% or more.

PALO ALTO, Calif. and ZURICH, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- ClearstoneIP today announced a significant enhancement to the Clearstone FTO platform with the launch of FirstPass™, the company's workflow-native AI capability. Unlike AI tools that generate outputs outside the workflow environment, FirstPass operates natively within Clearstone FTO, delivering structured analysis inside the attorney review process.

For most IP teams, freedom-to-operate (FTO) review requires navigating disparate tools, spreadsheets, and manual handoffs, with analysis that arrives outside the environment where decisions are made. Clearstone FTO was purpose-built by patent attorneys who experienced that reality firsthand and saw an opportunity to fundamentally change how FTO work gets done.  FirstPass represents a significant advancement in the platform's evolution: prior art analysis, claim determinations, and risk assessment are now executed and structured within the same environment where attorneys document rationale, manage decisions, and build institutional knowledge, compressing the time spent on search, analysis, and documentation while ensuring the structured workflow that makes a clearance opinion defensible remains intact.

"FTOs are not reports. They are a chain of decisions involving R&D, in-house counsel, outside counsel, patent engineers, searchers, and analysts, and the work product of that process includes decisions, rationale, commentary, and escalation triggers. When AI generates analysis that fits directly into that workflow, it puts practitioners in a fundamentally more powerful position than any report can. That is what FirstPass is built to do. AI lives in the workflow," said Gabe Sukman, Founder and CEO, ClearstoneIP.

FirstPass was made available to a select group of IP professionals during a beta program that ran throughout early 2026. Beta participants reported material reductions in FTO review time by 50%. In live testing, FirstPass analyzed 50 patent documents in under two minutes, delivering structured claim-level analysis, risk ratings, and workflow status suggestions for each. In comparative testing, the system correctly identified the same patents attorneys had manually flagged as high-risk, confirming that the AI-generated first pass aligns with experienced practitioner judgment.

"I have been doing freedom-to-operate investigations for over 20 years, and the workflow has always been the bottleneck. What FirstPass does is give our attorneys a high-quality first impression of every patent in the review, surfacing the elements most likely to clear, flagging where we need more information, and summarizing what matters before we even open the file," noted Edward Evans, Partner at Michael Best & Friedrich LLP and FirstPass beta participant.

"In our testing, it correctly identified the same high-risk patents our attorneys had manually flagged. That kind of accuracy, across an entire search result set, in the time it used to take to get through a handful of patents manually, is a fundamental shift," added Evans. "We've been able to shift some of our attorney time away from the mechanical work of annotation and toward the higher-level analysis that actually requires our judgment."

To learn more about Clearstone FTO and FirstPass, visit www.clearstoneip.com

About ClearstoneIP
ClearstoneIP was founded by patent attorneys to set the industry standard for digital freedom-to-operate management. The Clearstone FTO platform brings together in-house patent teams, R&D, and outside counsel in a purpose-built environment designed for the full complexity of patent clearance. With the launch of FirstPass, Clearstone FTO is the first purpose-built FTO platform to deliver Workflow-Native AI, providing review-ready analysis in an environment that preserves attorney judgment, rigor, and defensibility throughout the process. The result is accelerated innovation, effectively managed patent risk, and a growing institutional knowledge base that compounds over time.

Learn more at clearstoneip.com.

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SOURCE ClearstoneIP