DemandFlow® Patent Management
The portfolio, out of the spreadsheet and into one record set.
Every patent, family, application, inventor, claim, deadline, renewal, cost, document and instruction as linked records. Versioned docketing rules turn each filing, office action and grant date into the deadlines it creates, a daily sweep reminds and escalates, the renewal board shows the cost to expiry and the products protected beside every decision, and finance gets budget against actual, a forecast by jurisdiction and a Patent Box pack for the accounting period.
The Challenge
A patent portfolio run from a spreadsheet is a portfolio run from memory
Deadlines are worked out by hand from the rules the clerk remembers. Renewal fees arrive as agent invoices nobody has questioned, so patents that protect nothing are kept to term while the budget is a guess. Office data is re-keyed from register emails. And every year the finance team asks for the Patent Box evidence as if for the first time.
Deadlines by hand
An EP renewal, a US maintenance fee and a PCT national phase entry each follow a different rule, convention and grace period. Worked out one at a time in a spreadsheet, one of them is eventually wrong.
Renewals paid on autopilot
The invoice arrives, the invoice is paid. Nobody sees the cost to expiry, the live family members or the products the patent protects at the moment the decision is made.
Finance assembled every year
Spend by patent, the five-year forecast and the Patent Box pack are built from exports and emails, and are out of date by the time the board pack is read.
Docketing
Deadlines from versioned rules, recomputed on every change
A shared library of 47 versioned docketing rules covers EP and GB renewals, US maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years, PCT national phase entry at 30 and 31 months, Paris priority, EP validation and office action responses for EP, GB and US. Each rule carries its trigger event, offset, calendar convention, extension, grace, surcharge and effective dates. Your team approves the rule versions it works to and adds its own internal offsets, such as instruct counsel four weeks before the statutory date.
Whenever a filing, priority, publication, search report, office action or grant date changes, the deadlines are recomputed server side and patched in place, never duplicated. Every deadline records the rule and version that produced it, carries two-person verification, and is flagged for review rather than dropped if a rule no longer applies. A daily sweep emails at 90, 60, 30 and 7 days, on the due date and the first overdue day, then weekly, escalating to the manager after one day and the IP lead after seven.
- Calendar and worklist with Overdue, Due in 7 days, Due in 30 days, Unverified and Escalated tiles
- Unpaid renewals merged in beside the statutory deadlines
- Eight automations: disclosure approval gate, provisional on first filing, filed and grant notifications, office actions raising a task for the handler, renewals paid or overdue, awards paid
Renewals and pruning
Every renew or abandon decision made with the facts beside it
Each renewal carries its year, due date, grace end, amount, rule version, renewal agent and the agent’s confirmation. A daily job asks the owner for a renew or abandon decision ahead of the due date, chases, escalates and marks no response. The decisions board lays the decisions out by column, and every card shows the cost now, the saving if abandoned to expiry, the live family members, the products that depend on the patent and its pruning score. When the decisions are made, the board builds the instruction file for the renewal agent.
The pruning screen weighs annuity liability against a strategic value score from 0 to 100 to list abandonment candidates, and the fee library per jurisdiction, fee type and year drives filing estimates and a 10-year annuity forecast.
Office data and documents
Office data proposed into a review inbox, never imposed on the record
Paste publication or application numbers, or upload a spreadsheet of internal references, owners and cost centres, and the import from EPO OPS or USPTO ODP previews counts and conflicts before anything is written. Once sync is switched on, daily office updates arrive in the review inbox as proposed field changes with the source text; accepting a proposal records where the value came from and reruns the deadlines. Office actions and counsel letters that arrive by upload, through the counsel portal or by the inbound email alias are read by AI into the same inbox, and nothing is applied until a person accepts it.
The patent record
Numbers, priority, IPC and CPC codes, business drivers, disclosure scoring, legal entity, attorney, family and technology area, with panels for inventors, documents, applications, claims, costs, renewals, deadlines, office events, instructions and products.
Families and applications
Families with INPADOC and DOCDB ids and a family tree diagram; applications with the dates that drive docketing and their relation as priority, PCT national phase, continuation, divisional, CIP or validation.
Counsel and inventors
Attorneys and renewal agents are your vendors, inventors are your staff. A counsel portal takes acknowledgements, documents, events and invoices checked against the estimate; an inventor portal takes disclosures.
Finance and Patent Box
Numbers the finance team can use without a reconciliation meeting
Costs, renewals and awards roll up to GBP at the platform’s monthly FX rates. Finance shows budget against actual by patent, a five-year cost forecast by jurisdiction, a cost waterfall and a forecast table by year, with paid and outstanding side by side. For any accounting period the UK Patent Box pack lists the products with qualifying patents, the qualifying rights, their in-force dates and the products at risk from lapse or expiry, and exports to Excel or PDF.
Inventor reward schemes name their statutory regime, milestone amount, royalty percent and valuation method; applying one creates awards per contributor at disclosure, filing and grant, apportioned by contribution, and the payment registry shows exposure by regime.
Coverage and expiry
Where the portfolio protects, where it does not, and for how long
The coverage matrix marks each family granted, pending or not filed in every jurisdiction, with a world map and a gaps list naming the missing jurisdictions per family. The technology landscape shows where the portfolio is concentrated and where the white space is. The expiry timeline plots the 20-year term with how many patents lapse each year, the protection left at each year end, the next expiry and the average protection life across live grants. Prosecution velocity and firm performance compare the attorneys you instruct.
Patent Box
The Patent Box evidence for the accounting period, in one click
Qualifying patents are linked to the products they protect. Set the period and the pack lists the products with qualifying patents, the qualifying rights, their in-force dates and the products at risk, then exports to Excel or PDF for the finance team and the advisers.
Part of DemandFlow
One module on the platform your operation already runs on
- 25 entities, from patent and family to fee, award, instruction and Patent Box product link, all on the same API, automations and exports as the rest of DemandFlow
- Inventors are staff records, attorneys and renewal agents are vendors, office actions raise tasks for the handler, costs use the same monthly FX rates as the rest of the platform
- Portfolio export to an Excel workbook or JSON of 22 entities with a document index
- Reminder windows of 90, 60, 30 and 7 days; escalation after 1 and 7 days; US maintenance at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years; 20-year expiry timeline
One Platform. Strategy to Stack.
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