Topics discussed include:
- The importance of communication between your technology manager, docketing manager, and outside counsel
- Fail-safe strategies for ensuring dates are correctly entered into the docketing system, including pesky USPTO back-dated correspondence
- How to reduce file and image transfer issues between your office and outside counsel
- Preparing and delivering accurate docket reports
- Why and when to de-docket
- Ensuring iEdison requirements are met and handling errors, omissions, and rejections
- NIST’s efforts and plans to modernize iEdison
Protecting your university’s IP is a critical task vested with most TTOs, and one vital component to securing that protection is managing important deadlines and maintaining an accurate database for the hundreds of projects that IP managers and docketing staff must handle on a daily basis.
Between the USPTO, iEdison, the EPO, and other international patent offices, there are many different ways to submit, handle and store correspondence, differing deadlines, and unique formalities within the prosecution cycle to keep track of. Inaccuracy or sloppy record-keeping can have a catastrophic effect on your university’s IP assets.
Miss a deadline… lose protection for the invention. The risk is too great.
That’s why an airtight IP docketing system is necessary. It results in more efficient internal processes, less frustration, and fewer emergencies — affording technology managers and licensing staff more time to focus on commercialization strategy. And it’s particularly important when managing the prosecution process of hundreds of different patents and trademarks that can last over a period of many years.
To help tech transfer offices ensure their docketing processes are fail-safe, we’ve partnered with Tyson B. Benson, JD, patent attorney with Vivacqua Crane, PLLC, to explore the ins and outs of the IP protection process and share his deep understanding of the importance of a tightly managed docketing system.
