Five reasons to use a digital platform to manage your foreign filing

For many patent attorneys, this will be a familiar routine: you’ve just finished filing a domestic patent for a client, and the next step is to begin the foreign filing process. And with any request for broad international protection comes many hours of repetitive manual tasks, admin and email correspondence.

 

But many of these manual tasks can be removed by using a digital foreign filing platform – a simple, intuitive portal for managing all your foreign patent applications. It automates and streamlines the usual lengthy, email-based processes, reducing them to a few clicks and forms.

 

Let’s take a look at five ways a digital platform can make your life easier.

 

Every target country in foreign filing comes with its own set of documents, translations, communications and office formalities to manage. All that paperwork, whether digital or physical, quickly stacks up. Eventually, large chunks of time are swallowed up by the hunt for information – a specific email, the status of an application, or which translations are still outstanding.

 

A digital platform gives you a single dashboard from which to track all the information you need, including specific country requirements, filing reports, translations and communications, so you no longer have to search multiple folders, systems or emails to find the information you’re looking for.

 

Usually, the local patent attorney and translation services needed for foreign filing are all procured and organized via email. Through dozens of exchanges with providers in each jurisdiction, patent attorneys slowly piece together quotes, fulfil country-specific requirements and acquire translations. It’s an arduous, inefficient process with plenty of room for error. Emails can get missed or buried in even the most organized of inboxes, and the attorney must contend with the challenges of different time zones and language barriers.

 

With a digital platform, you can submit orders, provide instructions to patent agents and translators, and check on the progress of your filing for all countries with a few clicks. Processes that would normally take hours can be completed in minutes.

 

An email-based filing process is painfully slow in many aspects, but perhaps the most egregious is the quotes. Your client has two big concerns: time and cost. But by the time you’ve written to a dozen translators and attorneys, waited for them to respond, extracted the relevant information from their replies and compiled it into a coherent quote, precious weeks have passed.

 

With a digital platform, quoting is instant. When you enter your application details, an itemized quote for the service, official and translation fees per country is calculated automatically. In a matter of minutes, you can generate and download a ready-to-go quote for your client, enabling them to decide early which countries to file into and budget accordingly.

 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of confidentiality and information security in an arena where a breach could lead to a loss of IP rights. Many firms operate secure email systems for exactly this reason. But no matter how secure the system, the human element still poses a risk. Most teams will be juggling multiple email strings per country and per case, and accidents happen. Someone could accidentally attach the claims from a different case, or forward an email to the wrong person. After all, even the most diligent of attorneys is still only human.

 

Other mistakes – such as sending an out-of-date document for translation, or copying the wrong information from an email – can incur extra fees, and every hour taken to resolve them is an hour wasted.

 

And what about all the country-specific rules you need to keep straight? The more countries you’re filing into, the greater the risk of missing something important.

 

With a digital platform, the vagaries of email communication are eliminated and the filing process is streamlined. The platform allows you to select your target countries and breaks the ordering process down step by step. It leads you through a series of forms and questions, ensuring that you’ve completed all necessary steps for each country. Country-specific rules are always kept up to date, so you never need to wonder if a rule has changed without your knowledge. You can also use the platform to share documents securely, creating a single source of truth for the correct, latest versions.

 

Filing the domestic patent application starts the clock – or rather, clocks – on your time frame for foreign filings. Different countries set different deadlines, and it is necessary to keep a close eye on all of them.

 

The more countries you designate, the faster your in-tray fills up with forms to complete, fees to pay, claims to amend, documents to translate, and more. And when each of those steps is slow and heavy in admin, deadlines can become uncomfortably tight.

 

A foreign filing platform not only eliminates the time-consuming emails and admin, but also makes it easy to track your deadlines. Your dashboard automatically displays the due date for each country, and allows you to track the status of your application and which steps are left to complete. You can also minimize delays by giving your team access to your dashboard – that way, if you come down with the flu, your colleagues can easily pick up where you left off.

Ready to give it a try? Our inovia platform is the best place to start. It’s free to use and instantly available – all you need to do is set up an account and let the platform guide you through your next project.

 

Rather than replacing the role of the attorney, inovia enhances and streamlines the process while helping you reduce cost. In fact, users have been known to save up to 40% on overall costs.

inovia’s built-in quoting module retains up-to-date fee information from over 150 jurisdictions. Together with more than 50,000 fee rules, you can generate accurate foreign filling estimates for any number of countries in seconds.

 

inovia also gives you flexible access to RWS resources: for each country, you have the option to use your own translators or RWS translators, and to select your own patent agents or take advantage of our existing global network of foreign associates with whom we have long-standing relationships. We offer flexible invoicing options to you and your clients.

 

Learn more about inovia or register for a free account today.