Knowledge

Can new IP Management tools help IP attorney progress their careers?

An interview with Simon Lotze at Aera Law Firm

Building a business case is a critical element in career progression and central to that business case is the additional revenue that you can bring to the table. Tom Nener from Pinsent Masons gave some advice to lawyers looking to sharpen their sales skills in the IP world and central to that point is the kind of service that you can offer to clients as well as the role of IP management systems in transforming the level of service that you can provide.

But what does that really mean? What are the core features and tools that allow you to make those changes? And how does the client experience change as a result?

That is something that can look a little different for each lawyer and firm that implements process changes as scale throughout the organization and so we wanted to talk to an IP lawyer to see how their process and service level they offer has changed as a result of using RightHub. Simon Lotze from Aera law firm in Denmark had some answers!
"Starting at the beginning of what RightHub offers young (or semi-young!) lawyers, one of the most important things it gives you is an overview. Because of the way that IP rights are managed, different portfolios and individual rights are often kind of melded together in your head - mixed up if you will. Right Hub gives you a way to get constant updated overviews of everything. And once you have worked with it for a little while, you will start to think in the way the platform shows you that things are.
In a way, it gives you a sort of memory palace that allows you to keep up to date with everything that is happening as it is happening. If a client would ask "How is Trademark A doing?", you are able to answer that question so much more easily and in detail than you would otherwise. That is certainly the greatest thing that I have taken from it from a client/attorney perspective.
Whenever I am on a call with a client or sitting in a meeting and they say, "we had that design, do you remember?" and I can say "yes, we registered that in January 2021 and in these countries". It works as a sort of catalyst for your memory.
So often, IP rights are managed on glorified excel sheets and your memory cannot really remember an entire excel sheet line by line but when you have a complete overview of the portfolio which is easy to filter and easy to sort and you are looking at that overview every time you are doing work for that client then that is very different. Of course, I cannot remember 2,000 IP rights all at once, but I will always have a very good idea of what is happening when I am talking to the clients.
And that is something that clients value very highly. They will often ask me "how do you remember where we had this mark or what happened with it?" and for me that comes from working with the RightHub platform and the different way that you are engaging with the portfolio and the data - from seeing the visual input every time you look it up. It jump starts my memory. And of course, not only do clients love to have that kind of service but it saves a lot of time for me too!"
To see how RightHub creates visual overviews of portfolios and data that are easy and quick to understand (and remember!), get in touch here and one of our expert team will be delighted to show you how you can begin to transform the service level that you can offer your clients!