Law firm chooses ACD/ChemSketch to make quick work of drawing and editing chemical structures for patents and legal documentation

When one of the country’s leading intellectual property law firms, Birch, Stewart, Kolasch, & Birch, LLP (BSKB), were looking for a new chemical drawing package, they tried ACD/ChemSketch. The attorneys were so impressed that they implemented the full commercial version throughout their offices in Falls Church, Virginia.

BSKB is a highly respected firm, committed to obtaining and enforcing trademark and copyright protection for its clients in the United States and internationally. Specializing in chemistry, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals, among an array of other industries, the firm requires a chemical drawing package that is flexible and easy to use. The recommendation of a colleague led them to try ACD/ChemSketch.

Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc.'s, (ACD/Labs’) ACD/ChemSketch, a popular chemical drawing package, is used by scientists all over the world to quickly and accurately depict chemical structures graphically. Structures are easily cut-and-pasted into various types of Microsoft Office documents to populate patents, publications, reports, electronic notebooks (ELNs), and more.

“I find the ACD/ChemSketch software to be very intuitive. You do not have to hunt around for 15 minutes trying to find the button you need or a specific menu to complete a task. I was able to start using it as soon as it booted up without looking at any user manuals or instructions,” said Thomas J. Siepmann, an Attorney at Birch, Stewart, Kolasch, & Birch. “Furthermore, it appears to seamlessly integrate with other Microsoft Office programs, such as Word. The automatic update feature for Word is efficient when making changes to structures imported into a Word document.

Made popular by its freeware version, available for non-commercial or academic use, ACD/ChemSketch gives users the ability to quickly and easily draw chemical structures and includes limited IUPAC nomenclature generation capability, as well as an expanded dictionary of more than 158,000 trivial, common, and trade names with their corresponding structures. The commercial version’s other advanced functions enable searching by chemical structure, substructure, or structure similarity within Adobe PDF reports, Microsoft Word, and other files.

“The shareware version convinced me that ChemSketch was the easier solution to a simple, uncomplicated chemical drafting program,” added Siepmann. “The simplicity and efficiency of the program helps me to work more efficiently in patent prosecution. I do not have time to stop and read a thick instruction manual every time I need to make a change to a chemical structure or import a structure into a set of claims. The cyclic compounds templates are especially useful for quickly drawing structures. ChemSketch makes it easy to work with chemical structures in patent prosecution.”