More inventors are filing on their own
According to IP Australia's Australian IP Report 2026, 52 per cent of provisional applications filed in 2025 were filed without a patent attorney, up from between 19 and 27 per cent over 2021 to 2024. IP Australia attributes part of this to digital tools, including AI, that lower the cost of drafting, while noting questions about the quality of what is being disclosed.
The usual reasoning is that a provisional is just a placeholder: file something cheap to get "patent pending", then pay an attorney to do it properly when the complete application is due. That reasoning rests on a misunderstanding of what the law requires a provisional to do.
What the law requires
A provisional specification must meet the same core disclosure standard as a complete one. Section 40(1) of the Patents Act 1990 requires it to disclose the invention clearly enough and completely enough for a person skilled in the relevant field to perform it. If it doesn't, the claims you file later can't rely on its date.
When the complete application is filed, more requirements apply. Under section 40(2) and (3), the specification must enable the invention across the full scope of what is claimed, and it must end with claims that are clear, succinct and supported by matter disclosed in the specification. Support means more than a passing mention. The description must give the skilled reader a real basis for the claimed invention across its whole breadth.
Novelty and inventive step are then judged at the priority date of each claim, which brings us back to the provisional. As we explain in the pitfalls of a poorly prepared provisional patent application, a claim gets the provisional's date only for what the provisional actually disclosed.
Claims and description have to fit together
The most common problem we see in self-filed provisionals is a description written with no claims in mind. Inventors describe what the product is and what it does, often in marketing language, and assume the claims can be worked out later.
The claims are the part of a patent that defines what you own. Every feature in a claim must be clearly described and enabled in the specification, and every important variation of that feature needs to be there too if you want to claim it broadly. When an attorney later drafts the claims for the complete application, they often find that the features distinguishing the invention from the prior art were never properly described. Any claim relying on them either lacks support altogether or gets only the later date.
A patent specification is not a product description. It is a technical document written to support a particular set of claims, and the two have to be drafted together.
The same applies to fallback positions. When an examiner cites prior art against your broadest claim, you amend the claim to add features that distinguish your invention. You can only add features that the specification describes in enough detail. A detailed specification gives you many such features to choose from. A thin one may give you none. Our article on how to read patent claims walks through an example.
Why AI-written provisionals carry particular risks
AI tools are good at producing text that looks like a patent specification. What they can't do on their own is decide what the claims should be, which features of your invention are commercially important, or which ones will matter against prior art that nobody has searched for yet. They tend to produce generic, well-phrased descriptions that read convincingly and say little that is specific. We look at this in more depth in can AI write your provisional patent application?.
There is also confidentiality to consider. Before you enter unpublished details of your invention into any online tool, check its terms to see whether your inputs are stored, reviewed or used for training. A provisional is only useful if the invention is still new when you file it.
How we prepare a specification
At Patentec, we draft the claims first. We work out what the invention is in technical terms and define it in a set of typically 20 or more claims, from the broadest reasonable statement of the inventive concept down to narrower claims covering specific features, configurations and methods.
We then write the detailed description around those claims. Every claimed feature is explicitly described, with its function, how it is implemented and the reasonable alternatives. Our specifications usually run to 20 to 50 pages of technical description, with drawings. Each piece of technical detail is there for a reason: to support a claim, to provide a fallback position, or to give us a technical point of difference to argue when the examiner cites prior art we can't yet know about.
We do this at the provisional stage, not later. The claims then have an explicit basis in the provisional and a firm priority date, and the provisional can be put through IP Australia's optional international-type search. We describe that search, and how it compares with a private novelty search, in prefiling novelty search vs international-type search.
So, should you do it yourself?
If you have a background in patent drafting, perhaps. For most inventors, the provisional is the document that decides the value of everything that follows, and it is the one document that can't be fixed later. The cost of getting it wrong is not the filing fee you saved but the patent you never get. Our article on how much a provisional patent application costs looks at that trade-off in more detail.
If you are about to file, or have already filed and want a second opinion, contact Patentec for a free initial consultation. We'll review where you stand and explain what a properly prepared specification for your invention would involve.