Who’s Carrying the Weight of Your IP Portfolio? It’s Your Docketer.

“If your IP portfolio were a castle,

a mansion, or a chateau…

…docketing would be the very foundation that supports the entirety of your estate.”

An IP portfolio—comprised of trademarks, patents and/or designs, including the applications that are in the process of becoming one of those—is the result of hundreds (and hundreds) of work hours spent, and thousands to millions of dollars invested. An IP portfolio is comprised of a magnitude of little bits of data, and of documents that tell the history of each asset.

An IP portfolio is literally a library.

Even with all the technology currently available, it’s not possible to maintain one’s library by oneself. For this reason, if you have an IP portfolio, you need a database to house the library and you need someone to manage the library for you.

You need a docketer.

Metaphorically, if your IP portfolio were a castle, a mansion, or a chateau, docketing would be the very foundation that supports the entirety of your estate. Anything you want to do successfully (marketing, licensing, research, strategy) begins with accurate IP data. Each day, the members of a company’s IP department are engaged in any number of projects involving their IP assets. And they need to rely on their database to be current and accurate.

Without accurate data, your company loses its grasp on making valid choices—an expensive problem. Companies are busy licensing assets, buying and selling assets, filing new assets, and marketing current assets. All of this activity requires, in different arenas, that the data of its assets is correct. Otherwise, companies may end up selling something they don’t own; they may buy something other than what they intended to buy; they may file for a new asset, but do so incorrectly and then lose their date, which had given them priority in the market. The bottom line is, without accurate data, a company loses potential revenue.

The most common challenge IP departments face in staffing a docketer to ensure the accuracy of its data, is finding one that has the combination of being knowledgeable, reliable, but also affordable.

Quality IP docketers are simply hard to find.

Docketing, historically, has been sort of half-valued. Those who are tasked with managing an IP portfolio for their clients, or for their employers, know how important quality docketing is. But docketing has not been the beneficiary of increased investment. Just the opposite. The budgets for docketing personnel are getting smaller, making affordable quality docketers that much more invaluable, if they can be found. This is exactly where outsourcing comes in to play. To find intelligent, quality docketers at an affordable price, U.S. companies and firms have begun to look outside of the U.S for the service.

What are the most common circumstances that would lead a client to seek outsourced IP docketing services? An IP department that is facing a budgetary cutback and cannot afford to hire or to keep docketers in-house; an IP team that lost its docketer(s), either to retirement or career change; an IP department whose paralegal has, historically, been providing docket support, but an increased workload has made it difficult for the paralegal to stay current with the docketing. Or perhaps the IP department has seen an increase in workload overall and, consequently, they need more support than is available to them in-house. Finally, sometimes you just want better help. Dissatisfaction with a company’s current outsourced docketing service is not uncommon. 

IP Sofacto Docketing offers IP docketing services in any client’s docketing system. Our services include IP docketing, data validation, and light paralegal assistance. We pride ourselves in offering global IP docketing that feels right down the hall, as if the service never left in-house. Whether the work you need is steady and ongoing, or is a temporary project with a short timeline, we strive to be the people you can reach, for the data you can rely on.

Every IP portfolio is unique and can have individualized challenges and needs in order to manage it. Docketers that are as firm and expansive in their knowledge as they are flexible in their work processes create the safest transition from in-house docketing to outsourced docketing.

Photo by Harsh Gupta