All too often CPA is thought of only for its patent and trademark renewals service. However, Helen Boydell, trademark marketing manager at CPA, explains how CPA’s portfolio of products and services unite as one integrated solution.

In a competitive environment, your company’s intellectual property (IP) portfolio should prove itself to be a valuable business asset and a measure of business innovation. However, managing and extracting the maximum value from your IP Rights (IPR) can often be a complex and taxing process. That’s why CPA has developed comprehensive IP solutions under one roof by defining the four key pillars integral to the IP management process: maintaining, protecting, managing and unlocking the potential of IP Rights.

1. MAINTAIN YOUR IP RIGHTS
You may not be aware that CPA has a huge commitment to processing design renewals in addition to maintaining trademark registrations and patents. To ensure that these rights are renewed on time, our renewals service is supported by regional Client Service Departments with comprehensive procedures to ensure faster and lower risk processing.

We take the renewal of IP Rights seriously. It is for this reason that we have a Data Migration Team to work with new clients to ensure the transfer of valuable IP data onto CPA’s secure internal system.

As the renewals provider with the broadest global presence, CPA has built up relationships with key agents worldwide, which ensures that we renew your IP Rights in the most efficient and effective way.

Formalities are a key part of our trademark renewals service. Asking CPA to prepare and send for signature Powers of Attorney means we can reduce administration for our clients, and we can also manage all legalisation requirements. Even in those jurisdictions which request a more substantive declaration, CPA will provide the appropriate documents – such as Affidavits of Use for the USA – in advance of renewal. This leaves you with the time to focus on other aspects of owning and exploiting your IP Rights.

2. PROTECT YOUR IP RIGHTS
The number of trademark registrations is vast. According to WIPO’s latest figures, there were over one million new trademark registrations in 2000 and over 21,000 international trademark registrations in 2003. With the increasing popularity of international registration, as more countries join the Madrid Protocol, it is becoming more complex for you to ensure that you are searching your trademarks comprehensively in all the right countries. Furthermore, some Trademark Registries only provide very limited search services before a trademark is registered. CPA believes that thorough searching before embarking on a costly product launch is the first essential step in a sensible trademark strategy. CPA provides searching services in all jurisdictions outside the UK.

It is important you are aware of any potentially conflicting trademark application filed by a third party as soon as it is published, so that timely opposition to any such application may be filed. This is especially the case in those jurisdictions where the onus for halting the registration of conflicting trademarks falls on the trademark owner. This happens when a Trademark Registry only examines trademark applications on absolute grounds (ie is the mark capable of functioning as a trademark?) and not on relative grounds (ie is there a conflict with other rights?). In such a case, marks can be registered that are identical to existing registered trademarks. Developments in trademark law such as the accession of the US and OHIM to the Madrid Protocol, and even the launch of the CTM in 1996, have also served to increase watch requirements.

CPA’s watching service provided by Trade Marks Directory Service (TMDS), part of the CPA group, can help you to protect your mark’s distinctiveness from third-party incursion. Based on a combination of technology and human skills, TMDS watches trademarks and designs in nearly 200 countries, and translates and transliterates every language in the trademark world. We are proud to offer a highly experienced team of 26 in-house linguists who watch the Registers, detecting potentially conflicting trademarks that are often missed by a more heavily automated service. We recommend that watch services are set up for key marks – whether registered or not – that incorporate all registrable elements including colour, sounds and smells as well as 3D trademarks and designs.

‘CPA is the standard. It is respected in the marketplace. It is simple – if your client files and registers IP and maintains it - you would renew with CPA. I would say that CPA is the accepted IP renewals standard.’
Attorney Firm

‘TDMS is great and one of CPA's biggest strengths.’
Corporate

‘We are building an IP practice so we will be relying on CPA Inprotech's rich functionality - the WorkBench Module which creates different work flows is wonderful.’
Attorney Firm

‘CPA's service just keeps getting better.’
Corporate

3. MANAGE YOUR IP RIGHTS
CPA provides software suites to cater for both companies and IP attorney firms – CPA Memotech 2004 and CPA Inprotech respectively. CPA Memotech 2004 is a fully web-based application available for in-house installation and also available as a hosted service for companies with limited IP infrastructure. It can be easily deployed to your entire company and allows you to manage small and large portfolios of IP Rights including dealing with licensing and agreements, cost tracking, invention submission and patent committee management, as well as software and IP law updates.

CPA Inprotech is a full IP and practice management software solution for IP attorney firms. Attorneys all over the world rely on this service to docket, manage and update thousands of IP Rights for their clients. It leaves you free to focus on filing, prosecution and IP litigation activities.

We know that clients find it helpful to access the information we hold about their IP portfolio online. That’s why we’ve continued to invest in CPA Direct. It enables you to access immediately all the patent, design and trademark data CPA holds about your account, run budget and portfolio reports, and submit instructions and queries online. These features help you to manage your costs, and enable forward planning and effective portfolio management.

In the fast moving world of the Internet, it is important that you register all your major marks, as well as confusingly similar marks as domain names. In addition to helping you to register, CPA is also able to transfer your names, and create portfolio reports. Once you transfer to us or register your domain names with us, we are able to process renewals on your behalf. Experts are also available to help you to search, watch and audit your names on an ongoing basis, and to handle any issues you may have.

4. UNLOCK THE POTENTIAL OF YOUR IP RIGHTS
Today’s businesses are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of their intellectual assets. The challenge is in identifying, understanding and improving these assets. According to Harvard Business Review, it is estimated that US companies waste $1 trillion dollars in patent assets every year.

While many major Patent Offices have put an enormous amount of data online, their systems are only suited to searches on an individual basis for an individual invention, rather than for any statistical examination. CPA’s patent analytics service, however, allows you to audit your patent portfolios and to compare them with key competitors. Not only does it display search results graphically in the form of a report, but our IP experts also study the trends and patterns and highlight how the data could help you gain competitive advantage. Demand for this service has really taken off as clients welcome the various methods CPA uses to interrogate patent data, such as backward and forward citation analysis, and find the consultative commercial approach the perfect way to define a company’s market value in terms of the IP Rights they own.

All quotes are taken from a global survey in 2004 of CPA's clients

For details of CPA's software solutions, please visit www.cpaglobal.com/software

This article first appeared in IP Review, issue 9

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