The advantages of having a full-service partner who takes care of your IP portfolio

When corporate IP counsel look to external partners to assist with their IP portfolios, it can be difficult to identify who to work with. There are countless providers in the market, some doing the same things, some doing slightly different things, and many focused on a small area of portfolio management.

It’s tempting to assume that a piecemeal approach, where one company helps you with renewals and another with searches and so on, would work effectively because the companies you choose are probably specialists in their particular areas of expertise.

But in most companies, intellectual property (IP) is not treated as if it were a series of small issues, but rather as a whole area for a team to manage. That’s why companies have IP departments, and not different departments dealing with every stage of the process. That’s why, when it comes to engaging external partners to take care of your IP portfolio, it makes sense to look for a provider that can provide a similar, holistic service.

The benefits of a full-service partner

Full-service partners for IP portfolio management are rare, but they do exist. As long as you are confident that such a provider can do all the things you need it to, it’s likely to be a far more effective option than using multiple providers, or indeed between outsourcing some of the work and keeping the rest in-house.

A full-service solution has many benefits, but perhaps the two most important are to do with cost and management. One reason a company might outsource IP portfolio management is to save time and resources, but that is unlikely to occur if all that happens is you replace an internal issue with multiple different external relationships, all requiring management from the corporate client. With Novagraaf, for example, you have a single point of contact who can manage the relationship across all areas of the work, meaning that you don’t need to waste previous resources.

But if those are the most obvious benefits, they don’t truly do justice to the level of service you can achieve with our end-to-end service. Each client now can define, in its initial service agreement with Novagraaf, exactly what level of service is required, ranging from relatively small, even one-off projects right through to a level where we take on the whole IP portfolio, working with external counsel on your behalf, managing filings, recordals and renewals across your portfolio, external counsels’ costs benchmarking, names creation, searches and much more.

Because an external provider such as Novagraaf works with a large network of clients, a full-service option is likely to be less expensive than doing things in-house, not least because you will benefit from certain economies of scale and be able to take advantage of the existing institutional knowledge of your provider (though of course client data is kept confidential). And in the case of Novagraaf, you will also benefit from technologies specifically developed to make the various processes involved less error-prone and more efficient, including artificial intelligence and machine learning programmes that will ultimately streamline the whole process of IP portfolio management.

As the complexity of international business increases, and with it the globalisation of commerce, it is likely that IP portfolio management will become more difficult over time. A solution which allows corporate IP counsel to focus on the core of what they do – developing strategy, leading decision-making on enforcement and helping the business to develop – while secure in the knowledge that the challenging tasks of maintenance, filing, and so on are taken care of, will bring a multitude of benefits, both tangible and intangible, to your operation. A full-service provider is the key weapon in your armoury to help increase effectiveness and reduce stress.

Contact us today to discover how managing IP can be effective and stress-free with our end-to-end service.