Simplify Mail Processing, for You and Your Clients, with PracticeLink

What’s the one problem I could solve, that would make you more productive and more effective every day?
When I ask that question of our clients in Intellectual Property practice, the answer usually boils down to one thing: Email.
Email overload is the bane of our business lives, but this is especially a problem in IP practice. On any given day, mixed in with regular invoices, spam, and routine communication, could be an urgent same-day filing request, or a notice of abandonment you weren’t expecting. Or a Notice of Allowance with a long list of steps to be followed in a short time.
These are complex tasks that can involve many different people. Mail has to be reviewed, connected to the right matter, routed to the right people, docketed, and put away in the right place in your Document Management System. And you need good tracking of everything that has come in and who has worked on it.
The Fear of Missing Something leads to another problem... Constant distraction: “If I’m not watching my email all day, I might miss something. But if I watch my email all day, I constantly feel like I need to respond.” This task-switching throughout the day diminishes our productivity and leaves us feeling more stressed and exhausted.
People have tried different solutions for managing email in IP practice...
cc: Everyone: Everyone gets copied on everything with the idea that this will keep things from getting missed. In practice, this leads to more overload, and more chance of something important getting lost in the shuffle. The complacency that “someone else is handling it” can lead to missed action with no easy way to tell who dropped what.
Mail hoarding: We sometimes see attorneys who insist that all client and agent mail come to them first, then they decide who to route it to. This can work in a small operation, but it does not scale to larger practices. And the stories of times an attorney has gotten busy or distracted and something bad happened are the stuff of insurance provider legend.
Manual triage and assign: This is usually a complex system of color coding, Outlook rules, routing procedures, and daily routines around a central inbox. It depends on a small number of people, or maybe just one, to classify the messages and route them to the right people. We see this method a lot in docketing, formalities, or other operational teams. It works, but it’s time consuming and can be fragile. People have to remember the rules and right color coding, and there is no tracking or enforcement of what steps have been followed. Something dropped in the wrong folder can simply disappear. When one person has to do all the classifying and routing, it creates risk and limits the team’s capacity to take-on more work. And, someone still has to profile and store the emails in the DMS.
Mail Portals: Software vendors have provided some version of mail upload portals for years. The idea is that clients and agents go to a portal to upload correspondence, select a matter, classify the document and submit. Some corporate clients use these systems to streamline mail from their law firms, but relatively few law firms employ them for their own mail intake. These systems are effective if you can get your clients and agents to use them. There are extra steps for your clients: They have to classify things based on your codes, and it creates a different process for working with you than for their other attorneys and partners. If the user doesn’t assign the right code, things can still get missed. If you don’t get complete adoption, you end up with multiple processes for getting mail, and still no great tools for making sure you’ve accounted for everything.
There is a better way…
PracticeLink is an operations platform designed for Intellectual Property practice. For more than 15 years, some of the largest IP practices in the US have used PracticeLink to give practitioners easier ways to organize their work. PracticeLink manages the intake and routing of more than half a million pieces of inbound mail for our clients each year.
With PracticeLink, clients and agents send email to your same central inbox that they do today. Our proprietary machine learning system matches the mail to the right matter and assigns a classification. Training data is local to each client, so PracticeLink gets better and better at identifying how your clients and agents communicate with you, and email data is never shared outside your firm.
PracticeLink routes email to the right combination of docketing, attorneys, assistants, and production teams based on rules you define through our no-code workflow designer. Attorneys and assistants can get alerts, or view messages pre-sorted into actionable lists using the PracticeLink portal.
PracticeLink saves mail and attachments to your existing Document Management System, and it generates reporting letters to your clients based on templates you tailor for each client.
A Profiling Wizard alerts users to mail that can’t be automatically classified. It lets them assign the right routing and even split up email messages with multiple attachments destined for different matters.
PracticeLink also retrieves mail from Patent Center and TSDR, with fully automated matter linking and classification, routing to stakeholders, and filing to the DMS. The downloaders support multiple customer numbers, and our proprietary look-back processes capture back-dated PTO documents that other systems might miss.
Intake and workflow tasks are logged to provide easy tracking. Quartz IP also provides active monitoring, with alerts to our team if the PTO systems are down, if downloads stall, if intake services stop running, or if documents are not releasing to your DMS.
PracticeLink lets you Keep It Simple. There are no extra steps or special processes for your international agents, no learning or adoption curve for your clients. Your staff spends less time color-coding and routing, and you get full traceability and expert support.
With PracticeLink, IP practices can cut mail processing times by as much as half, freeing skilled resources for higher valued tasks, giving practitioners greater peace of mind, and supporting more resilient IP operations. Moving mail through your systems faster also supports faster client reporting, leading to better communication and service levels with your clients.
Making mail intake easier is just one of the many ways PracticeLink promotes Excellence in IP Operations. Read more here or contact us to learn more.