How Specialist IP Management Software Can Support Law Firms

Dedicated IP management software can enable law firms of all sizes to enhance their capacity and provide a better experience for clients, explains Tom Parish, Commercial Director of Equinox, part of the Questel group. 

Specialist IP management systems (IPMS) support all types of organizations to better manage their workloads, reduce process complexity, and save valuable time. However, for law firms, they can also help to improve client experience and support growth.

Here, we explore four benefits of intellectual property software for asset management and demonstrate how it helps IP professionals in private practice across the world.

4 Benefits of IP Management Software for Law Firms

• 1. Simplify task management

IP professionals face a mountain of tasks, and juggling deadlines, applications, renewals, and finance across a range of clients can be a daunting prospect. Keeping track of dates and activities requires careful planning, which can place a burden on law firms and their processes.

Fundamentally, an IPMS will make it easier for you to manage tasks: it tells you what task you need to do and when you need to do it, minimizing the time-consuming planning needed in your processes and drastically reducing the opportunities for human error.

The right IP management software should also keep your whole team working together—and not just attorneys. Everyone from a managing partner to a paralegal or legal assistant can use the software to manage their individual tasks, plus your finance team can see everything they need to handle with minimal input from those managing cases. With all your team on one platform, you can work more cohesively and deliver more effective services to your clients.

• 2. Save valuable time

By helping you manage your tasks more effectively, the right IPMS can also save you bags of time. With integrated document management, invoicing, correspondence, and a variety of templates, your IPMS should enhance your existing processes and can provide what you need when you need it. 

Wrestling with endless files, emails, letters, and notes on a case can add up quickly to occupy precious hours. Modern IP management software keeps all a case’s files in one place: every application, draft document, and official communication handled by your team is stored in a single location to make it as easy as possible to find the information you need. Having a smart system that automatically organizes this for you saves time, freeing you up to focus on the cases themselves.

Correspondence is another task that eats up time. Writing, following up, and filing emails and letters to clients, patent and trademark offices, and other attorneys can seem like an endless cycle, but IP management technology offers solutions. In Equinox Law Firm and Equinox Law Firm+, for example, template emails are automatically generated, so you will have drafts ready with your case’s details so you can fill in the final information. These templates, which can be sent directly from the system or exported to Outlook or Gmail, cut a significant chunk of the work needed to manage communications. They are also automatically organized within the relevant case to further ease the document management process.

• 3. Reduce complexity

Legal professionals rely on a variety of software solutions to manage their cases. With everything from emails to finance software requiring attention, it can be hard to keep track of changes across every service you use. An IPMS can bring all these elements together in one place, allowing you to handle the full lifecycle of a case from within the system.

Having a system that integrates with your other services reduces complexity, allowing you to oversee every element of a case’s management in one location and automate your activity across platforms. In Questel’s Equinox intellectual property software for asset management, emails and document management are handled within the system, and we also have built-in integrations with a host of other services such as Microsoft Office, Xero, Sage, Billtrader, and others, so our users don’t need to leave the system to manage a case throughout its lifecycle.

• 4. Keep clients happy

Providing a strong communications channel with clients is vital for law firms. It is enormously encouraging for clients to have visibility of how their cases are progressing and offering this instils confidence in your services. There are different ways to achieve this, and the traditional channels of regular updates and meetings will always have their place. However, IP management technology can offer an additional opportunity for your clients to keep tabs on your progress.

The clients of law firms using Equinox Law Firm and Equinox Law Firm+ can view the cases and property under management through a client access portal. Thanks to this round-the-clock access to case progress information, clients are confident in the services provided. As well as providing maximum transparency, this can also reduce the number of meetings and calls needed throughout the lifecycle of a case.

Which IP Management Software Should Your Law Firm Use?

Adopting a reliable IPMS simplifies processes and makes it easier for a law firm to maintain control over the information it handles. However, on-premises IP management software can be difficult to manage, and when something goes wrong, it could take a while to get back on track. Users of Equinox Law Firm and Equinox Law Firm+ have constant access to a team of system experts: because our team knows the software so well, they also know how to identify, isolate, and respond to a problem as fast as possible.

IP Management Software Benefits in a Nutshell

Ultimately, IP professionals and the firms they work in want to keep their clients confident in their services. While the effective practice of IP law will always come down to the skill, experience, and expertise of those legal professionals, adopting a specialist IPMS offers a great deal of support to those skills. It can be the golden ticket to enhancing the processes of your law firm.

The right IP management system should manage and organize every one of your tasks to reduce the planning burden and greatly reduce the opportunities for human error. With the whole team using a single system, and with all the information and services you need in one accessible platform, you will likely see a boost in the productivity of your organization. A more reliable, secure, and transparent system will be mirrored in your reputation with clients and support your well-practiced professional ability.

Tom Parish is the Commercial Director of Equinox, a Questel company.