by Dennis Crouch
When I set out to update my 2008 study on patent document size, I had a specific hypothesis in mind. The Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014), transformed how patent attorneys draft applications, particularly in the software and business method space. Practitioners responded to Alice's tightened eligibility standards by loading their specifications with technical detail, implementation examples, and hardware-integration language designed to demonstrate that an invention is more than an "abstract idea." If Alice changed drafting behavior, I expected to see a structural break in patent document metrics around 2014-2015. I found something different. Patent specifications have indeed gotten dramatically longer over the past twenty years, but the growth curve is smooth and monotonic. It was well underway before Alice was decided. Using the population of 7.6 million published patent applications from 2005 through early 2025, this study finds specifications nearly doubled, from about 7,600 words to over 13,000. But the growth in document length was not matched by growth in claims. Average claim count actually fell, reversing the upward trend I had documented back in 2008.
In 2008, I reported that patent documents were getting bigger in every dimension: longer specifications and more claims. Both trends moved in the same direction. The story was straightforward: patents were growing. The new data is a bit more complicated. Specifications continued their upward march, but claim counts peaked around 2005 and have been declining ever since.
