Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Patent Management Process
Posted by Jerry Lamigo on Mon, Jan 18, 2010
If you are part of an IP department in a mid-to-large size organization, you are probably facing the same issues as other organizations: More filings with limited budgets, and a greater need for responsiveness to the business clients with a smaller team. In short, you and your team are being asked to do much more with less resources.
Maximizing process efficiency is one of the IP department's biggest challenges for effective patent management. Here are the the top 5 tips to optimize your patent management processes:
1) Self Service for Inventors and Service Providers
Create a self service portal for inventors where they can track the status of their patent filings. This will reduce the number of incoming inquiries and improve inventor satisfaction.
The portal can also help your outside law firms and agents collaborate with you and inventors in real-time and enter information directly into your system. This will help you reduce administrative costs related to data reentry and follow-ups and improve data integrity.
You will be able to delegate tasks with confidence and transfer matters seamlessly to another firm when needed.
2) Electronic Case Repository
As a progressive legal department, you will get much better visibility into the entire patent lifecycle by setting up a centralized case repository.
The repository should include a complete filing history: documents, cited references, all correspondence, and docketing. It should also provide the most up to date information about all matters including current status, filing and prosecution history, outstanding actions, and annuity information.
Having a centralized repository will provide you with the tools to selectively share relevant information with all stakeholders. For example, getting formal reviews by the patent committee on international filing decisions and annuity payments for collective decision making.
3) Integrate Billing and Estimates into Workflow Processes
You can optimize your financial performance by integrating budgets and estimates in the workflow processes. This will help you track firms and attorneys who have a better turnaround time over other firms that routinely file extensions. This information will provide you with effective tools for future work allocation and for reorganizing the workload according to your budget constraints.
Integrating billing will also allow to forecast your costs more accurately and help you measure the overall spend by firms, by countries, and other metrics.
4) Automate Manual Operations
Where possible, automate manual operations. If your team is spending 2 days a month calculating patent awards, it is time to automate that function. If your law firms are directly working with inventors for drafting application specs, it is time to give them a system where they can work together in a collaborative manner. If you are spending too much time reentering data provided by firms or patent offices, use technology integration to interface with patent offices and law firms.
Identify all opportunities to automate manual operations and use technology tools to get them automated.
5) Patent Characterization
Characterize your patent portfolios according to technology areas, business units, products and ratings. Establish workflow processes for regular updates to the categorizations and use analytical tools to spot trends, find anomalies, identify strengths and weaknesses by leveraging your IP assets data.
Lecorpio patent management enables IP departments to collaborate with inventors, law firms, and other stakeholders as one for competitive advantage. The system provides a self service portal and organizes all patent information in a centralized case repository. It brings structure to patent preparation and filing through prosecution and maintenance processes. With Lecorpio's Spend Management solution, you can manage budgets, estimates, and actuals for each activity to efficiently manage resources and reduce costs.
To schedule a demo, visit http://www.lecorpio.com/schedule-a-demo or call (408) 850-7260.
Image courtesy of aboveboardpatents.com
