DemandFlow Support Centre

DemandFlow helps you manage your patent portfolio from the first invention disclosure through to maintaining granted patents for their full term. This article gives a short tour of what you can do and how your patent information is arranged.

What you can do

• Capture new inventions and track them through provisional, PCT and national-phase filings.
• Hold one patent in a single place, even when it has been filed in multiple countries.
• Record individual claims so you can use them for claim charting and infringement analysis.
• Credit each inventor with the order they appear and the percentage they contributed.
• Keep a full record of patent costs: filing fees, prosecution, attorney fees, annuities and translation charges.
• Schedule and pay renewal fees per country, including due dates, grace periods and payment receipts.
• Group related patents into families so continuations, divisionals and related filings stay connected.
• Classify patents by technology area and business driver to support portfolio analysis.

How your patent information is arranged

Everything hangs off a single patent record. The patent holds the invention title, abstract, main inventor, primary jurisdiction and the high-level dates and classification details.

You can then attach the following to a patent:

• Jurisdiction applications: one per country or regional office you have filed in. Each application tracks its own filing, publication and grant numbers, the prosecution date trail, the assignee and the attorney handling it.
• Claims: the individual claims in the patent, flagged as independent or dependent.
• Inventors: the people who contributed, with their order, percentage contribution, a contribution description and their declaration status.
• Costs: any fees you have incurred, paid or are due to pay, linked to a specific jurisdiction application where relevant.
• Renewals: annuity and maintenance-fee schedules per jurisdiction, so you know exactly what is due and when.

Three smaller pieces of reference data sit alongside patents:

• Inventors as people in their own right, optionally linked to an internal staff record.
• Jurisdictions: the patent offices you work with, such as USPTO or EPO.
• Technologies: your technology categories for portfolio reporting.

You can also group patents into families where continuations, divisionals and continuations-in-part share a common priority.

A typical workflow

1. Set up your reference data once. Add the jurisdictions you file in, the technology categories you operate in and the inventors who contribute.
2. Create a new patent record when an invention is disclosed.
3. Add the inventors to the patent, capturing their order and percentage contribution.
4. Record the claims.
5. Add a jurisdiction application each time you file, starting with the provisional or PCT and adding national-phase applications as you enter new countries.
6. Update each jurisdiction application as prosecution progresses: publication, office actions and grant.
7. Log costs as they are incurred, linked to the relevant jurisdiction application.
8. After grant, schedule renewals per country and mark them paid when the annuity clears.
9. Group the patent into a family if you have continuations, divisionals or related filings.

Where to go next

The remaining articles in this category walk through each activity step by step. Start with Setting up reference data if you are configuring patent management for the first time, or go straight to Creating a patent record if your reference data is already in place.