The Problem
IP owners can spend up to $50K on patent preparation and prosecution. Reducing the time and costs associated with this process, while still securing broad, relevant claims is critical for IP Teams.
At the same time, controlling maintenance costs and ensuring IP continues to reflect a company's strategic focus becomes increasingly difficult as the portfolio grows
Tradespace Solution
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AI-Powered Preparation: Tradespace consolidates disclosure materials into a comprehensive package for outside counsel that reduces billable hours spent working with IP teams and inventors
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Automate Provisional Patents: Generate high-quality coversheet provisionals with the click of a button
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Smart Docketing: Automated task management based on a global law engine to track filing, annuity, and royalty deadlines
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Agreement Management: Tradespace integrates with powerful CLM tools to track agreements, extract key terms, ensure compliance, and maximize royalties
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Annuities Management: Identify opportunities to divest non-core assets before maintenance payments based on product mapping, evidence of use, and commercial value
Customer Story
AerospaceCo
AerospaceCo has built a portfolio of over 5,000 patents. Between new filings and maintaining patents, they spend $40M every year on patents.
Persistent economic uncertainty and a major product recall forced AerospaceCo's leadership to look for ways to reduce costs across the enterprise. As a cost-center, the IP organization was shortlisted as a condidate for staffing reduction to reduce costs. IP leaders turned to Tradespace to identify cost savings within their patent process to reduce costs without reducing the size of their team.
AerospaceCo used Tradespace to identify three potential areas for cost savings: Maintenance Payments, Ongoing Prosecution, and New Filings. Ultimately, AerospaceCo was able to save $7M in maintenance payments and prosecution costs in a single year. They also implemented a new disclosure evaluation framework based on Tradespace's AI Evaluation tools to reduce the volume of future filings, while also increasing the quality of their new filing pipeline.
Maintenance Payments:
Because AerospaceCo managed their IP portfolio in Tradespace, they had full visibility into the costs associated with every stage of the IP lifecycle. They also leveraged Tradespace's AI categorization tools to map disclosures, provisionals, applications, and grants to an internal technology and product taxonomy. This made it easy review every technology and product area in which AerospaceCo had upcoming maintenance payments.
AerospaceCo immediately realized that 40% of these assets no longer mapped to active products. Using Tradespace, they then analyzed these assets for evidence of use at their primary competitors. This left 700 patents that neither mapped to active products or read on competitors. By dropping these patents, AerospaceCo saved $4M in maintenance fees that year.
Patent Prosecution:
Using Tradespace's smart docketing tools, AerospaceCo identified 100 patent applications that either had a low likelihood of grant, or for which there was a limited ROI for continuing to respond to office actions given changes to the claims. Once again, Tradespace's dynamic mapping of applications to products and competitors made it easy to justify their decision to abandon nearly 25 applications.
New Filings
Lastly, AerospaceCo implemented a new process for evaluating new disclosures focused on patent quality instead of patent quantity. Using Tradespace's AI-powered disclosure evaluation tool, AerospaceCo was able to institute a series of gates based on patentability, detectability, and business strategy alignment that ensured they only filed on inventions that added significant value to the business that saved $1M the first year they implemented it