Accurate AI, Missing Pieces: Why Law Needs Reliable Patent-Search Infrastructure

The piece argues that AI used in legal patent search can be accurate yet incomplete if it lacks scalable, reliable recall across hundreds of millions of documents. Melange, aided by Pinecone, demonstrates that infrastructure—not just model quality—limits unseen 'unknown unknowns' that can miss crucial prior art, potentially inflating litigation costs. Building a robust retrieval backbone is essential to prevent costly missteps in high-stakes patent cases.