Building an IP docket that survives an audit

An intellectual property audit is a test of the record, not of the brand story. The questions are short. Who owns this right? Is it in force? When is the next official action? Is anyone else allowed to use it? If the answers live in a solicitor's inbox and a spreadsheet called 'final_v7', the audit will take a month and still miss something.

The fields that actually matter

• Official number and office, not an internal nickname.
• Owner of record, exactly as it appears on the register, plus the legal entity number if the owner has been renamed or merged.
• Status, in words a non-lawyer can use: pending, registered, lapsed, opposed.
• Next official action and the date we must instruct by, which is earlier than the official due date.
• Licences, security interests and coexistence agreements that limit what the owner can do.

Two calendars, not one

The official due date is the date the office will accept a fee. The instruction date is the date we need a yes or a no from you. A docket that only stores the official date will bounce a reminder off a director who is on leave. We store both, and we escalate when the instruction date passes in silence.

Evidence, not atmosphere

Use evidence for trade marks, disclosure logs for designs, assignment deeds for commissioned work, and annuity receipts for patents belong in the matter, not in a shared drive named after the person who left. When a buyer asks for the last five years of renewals, we export the receipts in an afternoon. That is what 'managed' means.

If you want the same view we use, sign in to the client portal and open the register. The fields are the fields. There is no second, tidier version for the website.

This note is general information about UK intellectual property practice. It is not advice on a particular set of facts. For that, write to [email protected].