Maybe you were taken in by an ad for workflow automation that could help your overworked support staff, maybe you hit the search bar looking for a way to reduce your IDS workload, or maybe you were tired of the other firms standing out to corporate clients with their use of data analytics.

Whatever the reason, you need to know that investing in legal tech is going to be worth the cost to your firm. So you negotiated a free trial, and you’ve got seven or 14, or 30 days to make sure this product will fulfill your needs.

There are many ways to evaluate the value of your outside counsel, whether using general success metrics or quality indicators like timeliness and ease of communication. But perhaps the most valuable indicator may be the average cost of an issued patent prosecuted by the firm.

Companies of all sizes want to make sure that the patents in their portfolio are worth the maintenance fees they spend to maintain ownership. Modeling maintenance fee spend can help you identify ineffective patents that you can offload to ensure proper investment in more important initiatives.

No matter your ultimate patent goals, modeling prosecution spend on pending cases can help you identify outlier applications and avoid lengthy, costly prosecution.

Whether you are a part of a corporate IP team or at a law firm, creating a standardized, data-driven approach to analyze prosecution performance is imperative to your success.

Data visualization is all about telling a story with data, recognizing trends and patterns that can help you in your decision making. But you don’t want to lose time struggling to uncover the meaning in all the charts and graphs.

To succeed in any industry, a certain amount of foresight and planning is key. For patent attorneys, identifying and taking action on high-cost prosecution can lessen the usual timeline and save money in the long term.

As we near the end of the year, IP managers and patent attorneys are more conscious than ever of their bottom line.

Patent prosecution is expensive and complex. And often, each individual practitioner has their own unique approach to reach that all-important NOA. But inconsistent practices and reliance solely on past experience can lead to inflated costs.