David Müller-Wiesner, Trademark and Patent Attorney and Shareholder at GLMR, shares the firm's experience using Equinox Law Firm and unpacks the features he and his team find most helpful.
GLMR is an independent IP firm based in Australia. Founded in 2021, the firm's team of experienced patent attorneys is passionate about providing personalized, value-added services in a broad range of technology areas. The firm delivers services to local and international clients by taking the time to understand their needs and provide advice in practical and cost-effective ways to extract the most value out of their IP rights.
"Our attorneys and support staff are of the highest caliber and expect our IP management system [IPMS] to do its part in lifting the workload," says David Müller-Wiesner, Trademark and Patent Attorney and Shareholder at GLMR. "By leveraging Equinox Law Firm's modular and accessible data infrastructure to help with as many automated processes as we can, our team can focus on spending their time where we provide value to our clients. It makes it easier to justify our charges and be seen to provide excellent value when we aren't billing for tasks that, for example, some of our software engineering clients would view as easily delegated to process automation."
Securing Assets Through Proactive Task Management
When your firm is managing an extensive portfolio, keeping on top of tasks can be challenging for even the most experienced attorney. Our Equinox IP management software (Equinox Law Firm, Law Firm+, Corporate, and Corporate+) is built around pre-set processes that track every activity undertaken and required on a matter with automatic reminders to ensure nothing is missed. Triaging your tasks by the urgency of action mitigates any risks of maintaining your portfolio and helps ensure every asset is properly secured.
"Allowing the triage of 'service goals' and 'fatal deadlines' means that we can weather periods of high activity, knowing that we are prioritizing the right tasks at the right time," explains David. "Automatic reporting and tiered dashboards of widgets mean that we can catch outliers and ensure our service standards are upheld."
As GLMR has found, having a powerful, user-friendly system genuinely improves your working day. In our Equinox software, you can adapt everything to even the most granular detail. You can change the terminology used in your system to stay in line with the terms your team already uses or create custom processes that boost efficiency and ease. During every sprint, our developers look for ways to improve your experience of using the system.
"If I were to recommend the Equinox software to another IP professional, I would highlight the high degree of customization and integration with systems of high complexity you might be maintaining yourself but that derive from data held by the Equinox system. For IP professionals with a lower systems background, I would highlight the responsiveness of the system—many similar tools built by larger IP firms in-house suffer from a lack of user focus leading to a blurred feature set with a high drag factor that erodes the joy of working in IP.
"The IPMS should make your practice easier and help reduce stress, not make life more frustrating."
David Müller-Wiesner
GLMR
The Benefits of System Integration
System integration is crucial to modern IP practice. Our Microsoft Office and email plugins are one of our most popular features. Ensuring all necessary correspondence is carried out can be time-consuming. Writing all those emails, saving a record of them against each case, and duplicating document copies take up time you could use to support your clients more closely. Our plugins allow you to create template documents, emails, and letters that automatically align and update against a relevant case.
When it's time to send an email to an official office or get approval for a renewal, your system can prompt you and create a template with the information ready to go, saving you valuable time.
This integration between your email, document management, and our Equinox system has streamlined the communications of hundreds of our subscribers worldwide and given them time back for more value-adding activities.
"The Microsoft Office integration is simply fantastic," agrees David. "While a lot of features would be known to users of other systems, one that blew our mind when we first started using Equinox Law Firm was that when you open an attachment in a draft email and make changes, the changes would not just be saved to the document attached to the draft email, but also the document on our Equinox file. The Outlook extension has become significantly more adept at recognizing matter codes in emails in the short time that we have been using Equinox Law Firm, and it is relatively easy to implement firm protocols to ensure correspondence is saved to file using the Outlook flag system.
"It is now a trivial task to quickly save an email to a file, due to the fast recognition of matter codes by the Equinox software plugin."
Support As and When You Need It
Questel's Equinox team takes it seriously when you have a problem. Since every firm is different, every system has different needs, and we can help you work out solutions that suit your firm.
Our Client Services and Development teams work closely with users to understand sticking points and resolve them. Following agile principles, we have a two-week sprint cycle, which means we are continually implementing bug fixes, security updates, feature improvements, and new tools seamlessly in the background.
"Generally, support is provided quickly and cogently," agrees David. "We often have very technical questions or queries about possible arrangements falling outside the norm—we rarely, if ever, have issues with the nature and speed of the response provided. Which is an impressive feat considering the time zone difference. For truly urgent issues, such as MFA problems, the 24/7 hotline reliably assists."
"We feel vindicated in our choice of Equinox Law Firm as a modular IPMS that allows us to grow in complexity and sophistication as our firm has rapidly grown. Using the Equinox software allows us to set in place workflows that are ready for scale while being operable at the smaller scale our firm started at. The ability to query data easily allows us to build our in-house systems to automate workflows outside of Equinox Law Firm, such as within Microsoft Office, leveraging the data held in our platform.
"Once proper protocols are in place, the ability to move tasks with highly automated correspondence attached between different team members and retain reporting oversight over client service goals and fatal deadlines at a team level is fantastic."
David Müller-Wiesner
GLMR
When your portfolio grows or you take on new team members, our Equinox IP management software will be there to support you. We want to see you succeed, so the whole system is designed to help you scale up.
Managing IP requires a lot of collaboration. Delegating tasks across your team and monitoring progress is simple in our suite of Equinox IPMS. You have an overview of who is responsible for what, so you can work together on cases while ensuring nothing is missed. With your team working from home or across different sites, it can be a little bit harder to synchronize your work, but Equinox software can bridge that gap, helping global teams feel like they're working side by side.
Wherever you're based and however you like to work, Equinox Law firm is the all-in-one IP management solution you can depend on. Get in touch today to discover how your firm can reap the same benefits as GLMR.
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