R

Roche

Roche cuts GenAI build time from months to days and saves $100K–$250K annually in patent attorney hours

Curated & reviewed by Peter Korpak, Founder & Chief Analyst, 100SignalsHow we verify
$100K–$250KAnnual Savings (Attorney Hours)
$375K–$475KConsultancy Cost Avoidance
Months to daysGenAI Project Build Time

Vendor-reported figures — source: www.dataiku.com

The Challenge

Roche’s patent process is high-stakes and labor-intensive: European patents often trigger oppositions and appeals that require exhaustive research across roughly 50,000 EPO Board of Appeals cases. Attorneys spent many hours on reference books and keyword searches, a slow, costly process that often produced incomplete insights. Rising case volumes and pressure to respond faster left the Basel patent team with limited scalability and rising costs.

The Solution

In 2021 Roche adopted Dataiku to bring GenAI into patent law analysis, starting with pilots for semantic search, full-text analysis, and deep search of EPO appeal cases (AskWhitebook). These efforts evolved into Themis PatAI, an agentic AI workspace that unifies specialized GenAI projects—including AskWhitebook and TheLake (natural-language Q&A over department Google Drive documents)—via Dataiku Agent Connect. The agent routes queries to the right sub-agent and was initially built for 80 European patent attorneys and paralegals.

Results

Time to build new GenAI projects fell from months to days. Roche reports $100K–$250K in annual savings primarily from reduced attorney hours per case, plus $375K–$475K saved by avoiding consultancy costs through in-house citizen development. Insight quality improved for more complete case law analysis, and TheLake is used by 30 attorneys every month.

Key Takeaways

    • Citizen development on a governed GenAI platform can let IP attorneys ship complex legal research tools without IT bottlenecks.
    • Unifying fragmented RAG/search projects behind an agentic orchestrator reduces switching cost and improves attorney adoption.
    • LLM Mesh-style prompt/model comparison with token-cost visibility supports responsible experimentation on sensitive legal data.

Share:

Details

Company Size
Enterprise
Company
Roche
Quality
Curated
Source published
Nov 5, 2024
Last verified
Jul 28, 2026

Have a similar implementation?

Share your customer's AI results and link it to your vendor profile.

Submit a case study →