GLMR is an independent intellectual property firm based in Australia. Founded in 2021, the firm’s team of experienced patent attorneys is passionate about providing personalised, value-added services in a broad range of technology areas.
The firm delivers services to both local and international clients by taking the time to understand their needs and provide advice in practical and cost-effective ways to extract the most value out of their intellectual property rights.
In this case study, David Müller-Wiesner, trademark attorney, patent attorney, and shareholder at GLMR, explores the firm’s experience of using Equinox and unpacks the features that he and his team find most helpful.
“Our attorneys and support staff are of the highest calibre and expect for our IPMS to do its part in lifting the workload. By leveraging Equinox’s modular and accessible data infrastructure to help with as many automatable processes as we can, our team can focus on spending their time where we provide value to our clients. It makes it easier to justify our charges and be seen to provide excellent value when we aren’t billing for tasks that, for example, some of our software engineering clients would view as easily delegated to process automation.
“Allowing the triage of “service goals” and “fatal deadlines” means that we can weather periods of high activity, knowing that we are prioritising the right tasks at the right time. Automatic reporting and tiered dashboards of widgets mean that we can catch outliers and ensure our service standards are upheld.”
When your firm is managing an extensive portfolio, keeping on top of tasks can be challenging for even to most experienced attorney. Equinox is built around pre-set processes that track every activity undertaken and required on a matter with automatic reminders to ensure nothing is missed. Triaging your tasks by urgency of action mitigates any risks of maintaining your portfolio and helps ensure every asset is properly secured.
“If I were to recommend Equinox to another IP professional, I would highlight the high degree of customisation and integration with systems of high complexity you might be maintaining yourself but that drive from data held by Equinox. For IP professionals with a lower systems background, I would highlight the responsiveness of the system – many similar systems built by larger IP firms in-house suffer from a lack of user-focus leading to a blurred feature set with a high drag factor that erodes the joy of working in IP.
“The IPMS should make your practice easier and help reduce stress, not make life more frustrating.”
As GLMR have found, having a powerful, user-friendly system genuinely improves your working day. In Equinox, you can adapt everything down to even the most granular detail. You can change the terminology used in your system to stay in line with the terms your team already uses or create custom processes that boost efficiency and ease. During every sprint, our developers look for ways to improve your experience of using the system.
“If I had to imagine a world without the Xero integration it would be extraordinarily laborious to handle our finances across the platforms. It creates peace of mind to know that when our Xero books are balanced, it is a view of our financial position corroborated by real-time data of our bank accounts.”
“Without the Xero integration it would be difficult to offer Credit Card payment facilities, and other helpful tools within the Xero ecosystem, such as expensing, etc. While it would be feasible to run the operational side of our business on Equinox finance tools alone, it is much easier to have all financial flows of the business within a single platform.”
The Equinox team takes it seriously when you have a problem. Since every firm is different, every system has different needs, and we can help you work out solutions that suit your firm.
Our Client Services and Development teams work closely with subscribers to understand sticking points and resolve them. Following agile principals, we have a two week sprint cycle, which means we are continually implementing bug fixes, security updates, feature improvements and new tools seamlessly in the background.
“The Office integration is simply fantastic. While a lot of features would be known to users of other systems, one that blew our mind when we first started using Equinox was that when you open an attachment in a draft email and make changes, the changes would not just be saved to the document attached to the draft email, but also the document on our Equinox file. The Outlook extension has become significantly more adept at recognising matter codes in emails in the short time that we have been using Equinox, and it is relatively easy to implement firm protocols to ensure correspondence is saved to file using the Outlook flag system.
“It is now a trivial task to quickly save an email to a file, due to the fast recognition of matter codes by the Equinox plugin.”
Our Microsoft Office and email plugins are one of our most popular features. Ensuring all necessary correspondence is carried out can be time consuming. Writing all those emails, saving a record of them against each case, and duplicating document copies takes up time you could use to support your clients more closely. Our plugins allow you to create template documents, emails, and letters that automatically align and update against a relevant case.
When it’s time to send an email to an official office or get approval for a renewal, your system can prompt you and create a template with the information ready to go, saving you valuable time.
This integration between your email, document management, and Equinox system has streamlined the communications of hundreds of our subscribers worldwide and given them time back for more value-adding activities.
“Generally, support is provided quickly and cogently. We often have very technical questions or queries about possible arrangements falling outside the norm – we rarely, if ever, have issues with the nature and speed of the response provided. Which is an impressive feat considering the time zone difference. For truly urgent issues, such as MFA problems, the 24/7 hotline reliably assists.”
When you need support, you don’t have time to wait.
Our Client Services team is devoted to ensuring our subscribers have the best possible experience with their system. When you have a question or problem, you can speak to them, and they’ll get it sorted for you. If you have a technical issue that needs a robust response, they’ll work closely with our developers or data engineers to create a solution. You can think of the Equinox team as your own personal experts who will keep your system on track and you working at your best.
With over 260 organisations of every shape and size using Equinox in over 25 countries, we can get questions come in at all hours, but no matter where you are in the world, we are there for you in an emergency.
“We feel vindicated in our choice of Equinox as a modular IPMS that allows us to grow in complexity and sophistication as our firm has rapidly grown. Using Equinox allows us to set in place workflows that are ready for scale, while being operable at the smaller scale our firm started at. The ability to query Equinox data easily allows us to build our own in-house systems to automate workflows outside of Equinox, such as within MS Office, leveraging the data held in our platform.
“Once proper protocols are in place, the ability to move tasks with highly automated correspondence attached between different team members and retain reporting oversight over client service goals and fatal deadlines at a team level is fantastic.”
When your portfolio grows or you take on new team members, Equinox will be there to support you. We want to see you succeed, so the whole system is designed to help you scale up.
Managing intellectual property requires a lot of collaboration. Delegating tasks across your team and monitoring progress is simple in Equinox. You have an overview of who is responsible for what, so you can work together on cases while ensuring nothing is missed. With your team working from home or across different sites, it can be a little bit harder to synchronise your work, but Equinox can bridge that gap, helping global teams feel like they’re working side by side.
Equinox is boosting IP professionals across the world.
Wherever you’re based and however you like to work, Equinox Law firm is the all-in-one IP management solution you can depend on.
Get in touch today and see how your firm can benefit from Equinox like GLMR.
