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.
Independent intellectual property management
"Independent" is doing real work in a software category where the vendor is often also a service provider. This page sets out what independence means structurally, where the incentive conflicts sit, and what to ask before a portfolio is inside someone else's system.
What this page does not do
It names no competitor and makes no claim about any other vendor's ownership or conduct. Those facts change and are hard to verify from marketing material. What follows is structural: questions you can put to any vendor, including this one, and check the answers yourself.
What does an independent IPMS actually mean?
It means the software vendor does not also sell the services the software is used to buy. Intellectual property software sits next to a large services market — filing, renewals, watching, translation — and some systems are built and operated by firms that also sell those services. That is not automatically a problem, but it is a structural fact worth knowing, because a system that recommends an action is also a system whose owner may profit from the action.
Where does the incentive conflict actually show up?
Most often in renewals and in what the system makes easy. A renewal is a recurring, high-margin service, and a docketing system decides when it is surfaced, how it is presented, and whether transferring it elsewhere is a two-click export or a support ticket. None of that requires bad faith to matter — defaults that quietly favour the vendor's own service line are enough, and they are hard to notice from inside the system.
What is lock-in in this context?
The cost of leaving, measured honestly. It is rarely a contract clause; it is usually the shape of the data. A portfolio exported as a flat spreadsheet of current dates loses the thing that made it defensible — which rule produced each date, what the register said when it was checked, and who verified it. If the export drops the provenance, the audit trail cannot be rebuilt and the next system starts from assertions rather than evidence.
How should data portability be tested before buying?
Ask for a full export of a real portfolio during the evaluation, not a description of one. The useful questions are concrete: does the export include raw source values as well as calculated ones, does it include rule versions and verification history, is it in a documented format, and can it be produced without vendor assistance. A vendor that can answer those in a demo has already made the point; one that treats it as a support engagement has also answered.
Does on-premise deployment make independence stronger?
It changes what independence rests on, from a promise to a fact you control. Running the system on your own infrastructure means continuity does not depend on a vendor relationship continuing, which matters for portfolios measured in decades. The trade is real: you take on operations, updates and availability, and for many teams a hosted arrangement with a credible export path is the better answer. The point is that the choice should exist.
Does independence matter more for law firms than for corporate teams?
It bites differently rather than more. A firm managing client portfolios has a professional obligation to act in the client's interest, so a system whose defaults favour its own vendor's services is a conflict that lands on the firm, not the vendor. A corporate team is more often exposed through concentration — one supplier holding both the record and the service — which is an ordinary supplier-risk question that intellectual property tends to escape only because it is unfamiliar to procurement.
What should a buyer ask, concretely?
Four questions, all answerable in an evaluation. Does the vendor sell filing, renewal or watching services alongside the software. What exactly does a full export contain, and can you produce one yourself. Is there a deployment option that does not depend on the vendor's infrastructure. And where is the data held, under which jurisdiction. None of these require trusting the answer to a question about intent.
Where Iprelia fits
Iprelia is independent and Swiss-operated: it is a system of record, not a services business with software attached. Every record keeps its raw source, rule version and full audit trail — the provenance that makes an export worth having — and there is an on-premise option alongside data residency in the United States, the European Union or Switzerland. It is in testing now, which is a good moment to ask these questions of us.
See the platform →What is an IPMS? →Read our intellectual property law analysis →
General information about intellectual property management software. Not legal advice.