PATENT INSIDER
Patent Insider: Aubrey Scroggs
Innovation Cred: Director of Product Management at Quartz IP; founding board member for the Florida Intellectual Property Alliance, a local chapter of the U.S. Intellectual Property Alliance
Favorite Invention: Michael Jackson’s moonwalk system. Or in patent speak, a “method or means for creating anti-gravity illusion.” (US5255452A) The patent describes a special mechanism in shoes that enables the wearer to lean forward and glide back, creating a floating effect. Granted in 1993 to Jackson and two other inventors, the patent expired in 2005 due to nonpayment of maintenance fees.
Most Promising Patent: A room-temperature, superconducting compound shown here (WO2023027537A1).
“If we could use a superconductor that works at room temperature and normal pressure, we’d save tons of energy that's usually lost because of resistance in power lines,” says Scroggs. “It would also boost technology like MRI machines and quantum computers.”
If only the patent application process had a simple set of preprogrammed steps to follow…life would be a lot easier for inventors and their patent attorneys alike. “Getting a patent from A to Z is not a straight line,” says Aubrey Scroggs, Director of Product Management at Quartz IP, a process and technology solution for intellectual property practice managers. “There are probably 65 ways to get one.”
Scroggs would know. She started her career nearly 20 years ago as a docketer at a large IP law firm where she learned the ins and outs and peculiarities of patent prosecution and the mindset of lawyers who shepherd inventions from idea to grant. Back then, she relied on the industry standard of sticky notes and legal pads to keep track of the fluctuating processes and shifting deadlines for clients. Today, she oversees those same sorts of procedures for Quartz IP, a provider of IP operations technology and advisory services provider of IP operations technology and advisory services with a mission to make the lives of IP practitioners a whole lot easier with automation and tracking of patent progression.
IFI CLAIMS talked with Scroggs just as the company was about to release its latest version of the platform. It was an exciting moment because Scroggs had overseen the revision from inception. We discussed her two-decade journey through the IP industry, how Quartz IP’s latest release streamlines the workload for busy professionals, the commoditization of IP, and why she was glad to see the company was using patent data from IFI CLAIMS when she joined in 2023. What follows is an edited version of our discussion:
IFI CLAIMS: What inspired you to work in the IP industry?
Scroggs: Everyone stumbles into IP inadvertently. Nobody comes here on purpose. But I have an IP origin story. I started by opening mail and docketing at an intellectual property law firm almost 18 years ago. For the first 10 years of my career, I worked on everything from systems administration to managing teams for law firms. At the most recent firm, I managed the IP operational teams and systems. As a result, my interest in the technology side of IP grew. Then I worked with CPA Global, an IP software company, which later was acquired by Clarivate. At CPA Global, I started with technology consulting, but I ended up helping them grow their full IP diagnostics business operations consulting branch. It was a business where we would sit down with clients and have them show us their tools—how they operate, how they communicate, what their workflows were, what the tech stack was, how they were making sure the right data got to the right people at the right time. I really enjoyed that vantage point. I worked there for seven years. I gained insights into the corporate client world after working so long solely on the law firm side. I was able to help IP professionals in both sectors to find ways to make their days a little easier.
Then I moved on to PatSnap, which is an industry leading patent analytics company. I worked on some really exciting projects that identified what the current state of IP technology, IP operations, and R&D was for certain partners and how we could empower them with data to make their jobs easier. I started my role with Quartz IP about a year ago. Quartz IP is an organization that has been around since 2006. They used to operate under the name of Aurora North. When I was at Clarivate, I brought them on as a partner, so I was very familiar with the product and how it could change lives in IP departments before I even talked to our CEO, Adam Kenney, about working here. I’m now the director of product management. I am responsible for reviewing the entire product and developing the road map based on client validation exercises. We just released our biggest update since I’ve been here and it has been one of my most proud professional achievements, yet. I started in IP and have become an IP lifer, now deeply involved in how to use data to drive decision making. I now sit behind the wheel of a tool that can automate a lot of best practices that I used to provide verbally in my years of consulting with law firms and IP departments.
IFI CLAIMS: Tell us more about Quartz IP. And about the big release you just mentioned.
Scroggs: Quartz IP was started in 2006 as Aurora North. It was a company started by developers in the legal industry. So, from the ground up to the top of the company, we are all IP people who understand this space and understand how technology and data can help make IP departments more efficient. And that’s what our platform is about. Right now, we exclusively serve law firms, but we are looking to expand that at some point. In a law firm—whether I’m a docketer, paralegal, attorney, CFO—our platform unifies all of the data. It can be public data, my data, data documents coming from other tools in my toolbox; I can sit down as a user and understand exactly what tasks I need to complete for the day. What are my prioritized items? What is on my calendar? We have such useful calendar and docket views for identifying critical deadlines, internal tasks and decision-making information that were built specifically for intellectual property. And what we do is we help folks sit down and say, what do I need to prioritize today? A traditional docket is this list of things upcoming. Those lists can get long and tedious and often don’t have a lot of things that are relevant to me as someone who needs to move a task forward. We get clients through all of that noise so they can understand what they need to do to move their specific tasks forward. The tool tells you what tasks you need to do to get something out of your queue and into the next person’s queue for review or filing.
We help with the streamlining of processes. If a firm has six different ways that they report out a notice of publication, we help them pare down and automate the workflow. We have a “no code” process design, which means that you don’t have to be a tech expert to set up a workflow that incorporates a particular firm’s standard way of doing things. Though firms are often working towards process standardization, there is always going to need to be room to allow for some deviation, whether it’s an attorney’s particular preference or a client service level agreement that, for example, requires reporting the firm’s receipt of a prosecution document in 24 hours instead of the firm’s standard 48 hours. So while we can help folks with that change management towards streamlining, we also have automation that can make sure the workflow goes in a different direction, so that those variations are memorialized in a system, and not only in the institutional knowledge of law firm staff members, increasing the accuracy of work products and making it easier for other team members to step in and help.
IFI CLAIMS: It sounds like a workflow platform for IP.
Scroggs: It does much more than just workflow. It’s a holistic IP operations management system that ties together your ecosystem of tools into a unified Bible of data. To use IFI as an example, our platform is connected to the actual patent data in IFI’s sources. The tool compiles data and documents so that we have a universal single pane view into everything that is coming and going so users don’t have to navigate multiple tools looking for information to do their job.
As a user, I can also look at what is going on with a case, even if I’m not responsible for advancing elements of that case. As such, you would be able to glean good insights and collaboration opportunities that help reduce time, cost and risk. We also do a lot of automation of client communications. We connect to the USPTO for documents, the IPMS for case data, and centralized firm inboxes for foreign agent communications to our platform to support automation around reporting that information to the firm’s clients. We pull the documents in, profile them and save them to their document management system in the appropriate place. All in about half the time that it would take to manually manage the intake process. Our machine learning allows the system to recognize what the documents are. Take a Notice of Allowance, for example. Once that arrives, there is typically a large checklist of things that need to happen in order to ensure that the case is ready for Issue Fees to be paid: Person A might be responsible for the first three things, Person B for the next two tasks. We make sure that we organize and send the documents to the appropriate members of the docketing, administrative and legal teams. The communication to the client is also automated within their service level agreements.
I mentioned earlier how we can accommodate variances in process—that even goes down to our reporting to clients. The IP tech industry does not have a lot of great options for setting up rules to the degree of granularity that law firms typically need for this. If my client is in the chemical division, for example, and they want extra documentation, whereas their colleagues in electronics don’t need the same level of service, we automate the reporting of that—how it’s profiled and managed internally. So you can essentially leverage automation to work faster within a means that still feels personalized to maintain critical customer service levels.
Quartz IP’s PracticeLink system also sends emails to clients to help centralize information. We try to give professionals an option to reduce work currently being processed in their inboxes so that those inboxes are reserved for exchanging substantive information, as opposed to being inundated with emails administrative management. Of course, we will always have users who are married to working out of their inboxes. However, we find that most clients enjoy keeping their email more open so that they don’t miss a client email saying, “Hey, we just found this reference, and I think this may get us into some trouble with the examiner.” Our platform can be used to separate the work product from that continuing conversation with the client.
IFI CLAIMS: What else can the platform help with?
Scroggs: It helps with the compliance and risk element by making sure we’re aligned with the firm’s protocols and their client service level agreements. We know these clients want things like deadlines and reminders reported differently, and we make sure they stay compliant with that. I remember the old days when what used to happen was that you simply kept a pad that noted the idiosyncrasies of different clients. The other thing we did was have sticky notes all over our computer screens. I will never miss those sticky notes. As a former docketer, I love talking to other docketers because I say, Hey, I bet you have post-it notes on your computer, and most of them say, Yes! How did you know that? I tell them, you don’t have to do that anymore because we don’t have to rely upon a single source of failure—in this instance, a docketer who was really good and understands this set of clients or this attorney. All of that is put into our automation.
IFI CLAIMS: You mentioned a new launch. How is that going?
Scroggs: It’s exciting. We wanted to prepare for scale and we wanted to make sure that we were running lean and mean on a secure and reliable infrastructure and solving the right problems. We didn’t want to add a bunch of fluff, so we spent a lot of time looking at the important things such as how to make pages load faster, how to reduce the number of clicks a user needs to get relevant information and how to connect more tools from third parties. We have several third parties we work with. We’ve recently added a new one that does cost estimation and are in discussions with several other vendors on how we can work together to help solve our shared clients’ biggest challenges. Along those lines, we are also looking at leveraging IFI further. IFI has a lot of data and it is a data source that is trusted by law firms. We have an information disclosure statement (IDS) generation tool, and our next release will have a focus on Reference Link, which is our IDS tool.
I’ve worked with other IP management systems in the past and what happens with a big tool is that it just gets too big to maintain. Which means it takes an entire person’s salary and time to be able to monitor, modify, and update the system. So we decided to spend a lot of effort just making it easier to manage the tool.
We have several new things we are also looking forward to introduce to our clients in our most recent releases. For example, in regard to IFI, we are adding the foreign reference documents, but we are adding within the context of what already existed and improving how we can make it scale quickly. I’ve worked with more than 40 different IP tools in my career, but I’ve never seen a company that has been so focused on making sure it just runs better and faster.
IFI CLAIMS: How does your system use patents?
Scroggs: We treat patents and trademarks the same. When we have a patent record, we connect to the client’s IP and document management systems and we pull data across all of the specifics of the patent. At the top of the screen, the user sees who owns the patent, when it was filed, when it was granted, all of that basic bibliographic data. Then you see the actions that need to be taken within the context of daily workflows. For instance, is there a deadline that needs to be met? If so, what information and documents to I need in order to make that deadline? Do I need to send a request for docketing to correct the data in the system? So we connect to the patent data from the firm’s IP tools and from our data partners, like IFI CLAIMS, to give users everything they need to take action.
We also tie that data to the connection within the document management system. So, if I’m looking at a patent record in PracticeLink, I have access to tabs with the relevant bits of information and functionality within that patent. If I want to see the documents as they live within the document management system, not only are we giving you a view into that, we’ve broken it into a trifold. So during that intake process that I was talking about earlier, not only are we pushing patents into the client document management system into the right place, with the right naming convention, but when I log in and look at the patent record, I get a live look into the document management system to make a decision, I need to see what the document said. With Quartz IP, I don’t have to go back into my email, I don’t have to go search through the document management system. All of it is unified into a single pane.
One thing we often find with technologies in IP though is the old-school attorney who loves that traditional red well or that file view where on the right-hand side is correspondence, the middle is PTO mail, and everything miscellaneous is on the left side. That’s why we give them that in-platform trifold view while they’re looking at that patent data.
There is also some cool functionality where I can take action from the matter level. Let’s say that I’m an IDS expert. I click on the upcoming, and then it takes me to a screen where there is an action panel on the right-hand side and a document viewer on the left-hand side. One of the beautiful things about this tool is that no matter where I am in the system, I don’t have to remember where to go to take action. It delivers the right set of tasks to me so that this piece of the process can be completed, removed from my queue and delivered into the next person’s.
We are working on better ways to leverage data from IFI and USPTO sources, so we can get insights and more information on examiner stats or likelihood to grant. In this way, we can improve prosecution insights in addition to the patent data that is accessible in the matter and client portfolio views.
IFI CLAIMS: You’ve been in IP for a long time. What long term trends are you seeing with patents and how companies are using them?
Scroggs: The commoditization of IP. A law firm used to be able to charge an hourly rate and bill that time back to their clients. But as the corporate IP departments realized that, on average, 65 percent of R&D dollars spent have no return on investment, they are finding ways to cut costs and make sure more of that investment is realized. The result of this is a requirement that their law firms agree to a flat fee schedule. Sometimes the flat fee makes sense in the context of the business of IP law, but sometimes it doesn’t. A good example of that is IDS management. A lot of times, corporate IP departments won’t pay their firms more than $200-300 for an IDS. But an IDS can be an arduous thing to put together. It requires at least three different people to gather, review and file. It usually requires at least a patent agent. Most of the time, an attorney needs to spend time to review it. And if you’re talking about one of these biopharmaceutical patents that has tons of reference documents, you’re talking about an agent or attorney that could have to sit down and spend five or more hours to make sure that they’ve combed through all of those references. With flat fee arrangements, they can’t charge that time to their clients. That attorney might bill at $600 per hour. If I’ve spent several hours on this IDS, not to mention what the administrators spent on both ends, then it can easily become a loss leader. That commoditization of IP has meant that law firms now have to do more with less.
As for the law firm side of things, we often see a revolving door. Firms are finding it increasingly difficult to retain IP professionals and reduce the cost and time of onboarding and training new employees on this very complex area of law. Patent prosecution is a very expensive department to maintain and they need to remain profitable. General practice firms bring on an IP department because they want the litigation piece of it. Litigation is the moneymaker. But when it comes to the prosecution piece, it’s the most expensive line item that they will see on their budget, and general practice firms don’t understand why it costs so much.
Another big trend in law and corporate IP departments is outsourcing. That way, you don’t have to spend the money or on-ramping time it takes to onboard new personnel. The ability to scale an outsourced service means that outsourcing vendors can charge much lower rates. In the world of flat-fees, firms having to do more with less, and issues around staff retention, outsourcing resource-heavy processes so that staff can focus more on billable tasks and growing business becomes an attractive option to law firms.
IFI CLAIMS: Why did you decide to use IFI as your data provider?
Scroggs: IFI was a decision that was made before I came here. However, I would have also selected IFI as a provider because I know that they will stand up to the scrutiny of our law firms who inquire about our data sourcing. Law firms want to know they can trust your data. And IFI has trusted data. Plus, the customer service with IFI is fabulous. It doesn’t feel like we are a client. It feels like we’re partners.