The work

AfterQuery contracts registered patent practitioners to build evaluation material for frontier model training and testing. A typical task starts from an invention disclosure or a set of prior art references and asks you to construct a realistic prosecution scenario: what the examiner cited, what the applicant is trying to cover, where the claim scope has to move. You then author the reference answer — an independent claim set, an argument under §102/§103, a response to a §112(a) or §112(b) rejection — together with the reasoning trail explaining why you drafted it that way rather than another way. The reasoning is the deliverable as much as the claim itself.

The second half of the work is grading. You read model-generated claims, office action responses, and prior art distinctions and score them for legal soundness and claim quality. The hardest and most valued judgment is catching output that is stylistically perfect and substantively fatal — a means-plus-function limitation with no corresponding structure, an amendment that introduces new matter, a claim differentiation argument that quietly narrows the client out of the market, an obviousness rebuttal that recites KSR language without addressing the actual combination of references.

What the screen looks for

  • Registration number and bar admission you can state and have verified
  • Real prosecution reps: whether you have actually drafted claims and answered office actions, not only read them
  • Depth under follow-up — the AI interviewer will push on a specific rejection type and ask why you chose one response strategy over another
  • Whether you can articulate reasoning in writing rather than relying on tacit expertise

Logistics

Fully remote, fully async, no client calls or docket. Work is pulled from a queue on your own schedule with a stated minimum of 10 hours per week; contributors report clustering hours in blocks because scenario authoring does not split well into short sessions. Pay is observed in the $95–140/hr range depending on task type and technology area, invoiced weekly via Stripe. Engagements are ongoing project work rather than fixed-term.