USPTO show-cause orders for zero-term filings
The USPTO is mailing orders to show cause in pending applications that would issue with no patent term. What the notice says, and what it leaves open.
Intellectual property management for law firms
A firm and a corporate team can run the same portfolio and need different software. The difference is not size — it is that a firm holds other people's rights, owes each of them separate duties, and has to be able to show what it did and when.
The structural difference in one line
A corporate team's docketing record documents its own portfolio. A firm's docketing record is evidence about the advice it gave a client. That changes what the record has to survive, and who is entitled to ask for it.
Why does client separation matter more than it sounds?
Because a firm holds portfolios that must not become visible to each other, and because the boundary has to survive staff movement, matter transfer and reporting. Separation is not only an access-control setting: a report that aggregates across clients, an export that carries a neighbouring matter, or a search that reveals a client's filing intentions to the wrong team are all failures of the same boundary. Ask how a system enforces it in reporting and export, not only in the case list.
What happens when a client leaves?
The portfolio has to leave with them, in a state the next holder can rely on. That means the export carries provenance — raw source values, which rule produced each date, who verified it — because a successor firm receiving only current dates inherits assertions rather than evidence. It is worth testing this before a client asks, since the moment of transfer is a poor time to discover what the export contains. The general version of this question is covered under independent intellectual property management.
How do conduct obligations interact with the software?
Structurally rather than through any single rule. A firm owes duties to each client — competence, confidentiality, acting in that client's interest — and a system whose defaults route work toward a particular service provider creates a tension the firm carries, not the vendor. Professional rules differ by bar and this page does not interpret them; the point is narrower and checkable: know whether your system's defaults have a commercial direction, because you are the one answering for them.
What does billing require from a docketing system?
A link between the action and the matter that survives being questioned months later. Renewals, annuities and official fees are usually disbursements rather than fee earning, so the record needs to distinguish what was paid to an office from what was charged for handling it, and to attach both to a matter and a date. The failure mode is not usually a missing charge; it is a charge nobody can reconstruct the basis for at the point a client queries the bill.
How should a firm handle deadlines it did not calculate?
By recording where each one came from, in the same way as its own. Portfolios arrive from other firms, from clients' spreadsheets and from agents abroad, and an inherited date has an unknown provenance until someone checks it. A system that stores an imported date identically to a verified one has erased the difference between a fact and a claim — and the first time that matters is an audit or a dispute, when the distinction is exactly what is being asked about.
What about work done through foreign associates?
The firm remains the client's point of accountability even where the filing is someone else's act. In practice that means the record needs to hold both what the associate reported and when it was received, distinct from what the firm derived from it — because a delay in an associate's report is a different problem from an error in a calculation, and only a record that separates them can tell you which one happened.
What should a firm test during an evaluation?
Three things a demo will not volunteer: produce a complete client export unaided and inspect what it contains; run a report that spans matters and confirm nothing crosses a client boundary; and take one inherited deadline and show its full provenance, including that it was inherited. The broader evaluation criteria are set out in how to compare intellectual property management systems.
Where Iprelia fits
Iprelia is multi-tenant and built so a record can answer for itself: raw source, rule version, calculated result and human verification are kept as separate fields rather than collapsed into a status, and critical dates are confirmed by one person and verified by another. Data residency in the United States, the European Union or Switzerland, with an on-premise option. It is in testing now.
See the platform →What is an IPMS? →Read our intellectual property law analysis →
General information about intellectual property management software. Not legal advice, and not guidance on professional conduct rules, which differ by jurisdiction and bar.