TRANSCRIPTION
It’s not just a docketing system. It’s a data management system. For me, for our firm, we have the ability to track the relationships that everything from the disclosure coming in the door to changes throughout the life of the patent or application as the client requires. It’s just such a complete and complex data management tool in one location. I don’t have to have a spreadsheet in excel with this data, and I don’t have to have an access database over here, and I don’t have to have this database that I have to open separate. It’s all in one location. It’s phenomenal from a firm perspective to make us more efficient.
Depending on the client, the information that they need varies. Their output varies. We have some clients that are very particular. They don’t want to see any part of our docket number, but they want theirs. We generally use our clients numbers. They want material, so I’ll get an email going, “Hey, I need this report today. We’re going to try to organize something and I need a list of this, from these dates, and I need all of the inventors, and I need all of the related cases, and I need da, da, da, now. Some of that gets a little tricky, and I have to manually pull it. Generally, I can go to Find, and I can go here are my parameters, here is all the data, the columns I want, and I can export it into excel and make it look pretty. Sort it. Send it to them. It’s in excel now. They can do whatever they need to with it.
I feel like so efficient when I can pull something together really quickly. They go, “Well, I know this is going to take you a couple of days.” “I’ve got it. No problem.” Then I whip it out in like 20 minutes or whatever, but I feel like I really was able to provide a quality product for our client and that our customer service escalated here. They always know that they can get that data from me and affirm us as a firm that we are always responsive. We’re always right there for them.
I love knowing that we provide this type of service to our customers, and I always talk to my team about client retention. It’s about client retention. It’s about perception of the client. You always worry that the client is going to find somebody better. The trick is to provide them such a high level that they don’t want to. We have been very lucky to enjoy some very long-term relationships with our clients. It’s my understanding most client relationships last about five years. We have some that in excess, significantly, of that time frame. That does speak to the quality of our work and the quality of the firm. I try to always, from an administrative side, build on that. I think Anaqua allows us to do that.