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Five ways Equinox saves time for law firms

By Equinox

Equinox saves time in a variety of ways.

We’ve carefully crafted the system to take your most time-consuming tasks and help you tackle them more efficiently. This could be with automation, easy to use templates, or clever integrations.

If you’re on the fence about adopting an IP management system, let us unpack the powerful features that could offer a huge boost to your firm’s operations.

1. Your processes made simple.

You’ve spent your career perfecting your IP management processes, and Equinox is designed to not only complement your approach but magnify your impact.

Equinox is powered by pre-set processes that standardise your case management. They list every job that needs doing on a case, give you handy reminders, and trigger other tools in Equinox that can automate tasks.

These pre-set processes aren’t set in stone. While we have an extensive catalog of pre-made options, you can customise and optimise your processes across teams and offices, reducing errors and ensuring a consistent experience for your clients. The huge range of configuration options allow you to base your system around the way your clients are familiar with while enhancing your capabilities.

You can trigger a whole suite of time saving tools with your pre-set processes for unparalleled control over your approach to IP management.

We've integrated Equinox with the USPTO

2. Process your renewals in batch.

Our built-in renewals functionality can help you ensure your portfolio remains protected with speed, convenience, and security.

Manually compiling all the information needed for a client to approve a renewal can take up resources quickly. That’s why we’ve developed a tool that does the hard work for you. You can pull a bulk report of renewals based on simple templates we’ve prepared for you. Rather than having to compile the information for each individual case, Equinox does it for you in significantly less time, walking your users step-by-step through the process to ensure no actions are missed.

We’ve made it easy to generate and track renewal dates, too. Our IP Services team monitors the laws for each country to ensure our subscribers’ systems are always up to date. You can access full logging and a history of actions related to each renewal due date, so you know exactly what’s been done, who by, and when.

Equinox users can see the quotes for upcoming renewals and report these to clients with ease. Quotes can be added manually at any time or added automatically at a pre-defined time ahead of the due date.

Prompt correspondence is key with renewals, so Equinox users can define when renewal notices are sent to clients, and the system will generate a task on each case with the renewal notice template attached, ready for sending.

Our built-in renewals functionality can be a life saver! It’s helped hundreds of IP professionals across the globe maximise their efficiency. Plus, we’re working on integrations with renewals providers to make our tools even more impactful.

3. Bulk-open cases

Opening large numbers of cases can become an administrative burden. Having to create applications and generate them into cases occupies one of your team members with menial tasks. But there’s a better way!

We’ve developed specialist tools that help you open cases in bulk. Not only is this faster than manually updating cases, but it’s another way to ensure consistency between cases and gives you confidence that everything is processed correctly.

For patents, we have a suite of tools that can handle nationalising PCT, validating EP, and generating Madrid Protocol cases. You can easily create cases, validate EP cases in your selected countries, and easily transfer base applications into Madrid Protocol cases with significantly less administrative time needed to complete the process.

Equinox has similar tools included for managing a range of intellectual property categories. Combined with our handy pre-set processes and advanced automation options, the system can massively streamline your IP management processes and saves time for your whole team.

4. Communicate efficiently.

Correspondence is a hugely important element of managing an IP portfolio. Beyond sending and organising notifications to official offices, keeping your clients up to date with developments is key. However, managing correspondence can take up a lot of time.

At Equinox, we offer a comprehensive communication system that makes it as easy as possible to handle every element of your correspondence. Using our integration with Microsoft Office and email services, you can create ready-to-send email and letter templates using merge codes that auto-populate client and case information from your system.

You can link correspondence to tasks in your processes, ensuring nothing is missed so your clients stay in the loop. The customisable Client Portal allows you to share documents, data, and reports quickly and securely with clients, granting them independent access to updates on your progress if you wish.

Communicating effectively with your clients is of paramount importance. These correspondence tools help you manage those communications more easily and augment the strong relationships you’ve built with your portfolio.

5. Accurately, easily, charge for your time.

Simple tasks like timing your work and organising invoices can eat away at your time. In Equinox, we’ve built in handy functionality that saves time and reduced your administrative burden.

When you start doing a task for a client, you can switch on your timer. This tracks how long you spend on the work needed. You can even pause it to make a coffee! Once your task is finished, the charge is automatically added to the case you were working on, so you don’t need to manually enter any information.

You can also set up and allocate budgets, add disbursements, and fixed service fees your clients have incurred, and assign discounts to your cases. In conjunction with custom invoices, you can smoothly export invoices to your accounting software, such as Xero or Sage.

The combination of these tools makes it very easy to charge for your time, cutting out the burden of processing your invoices and making it easier to provide accurate cost estimates to clients.

Integrations at Equinox

Equinox saves time for your whole team.

Equinox can help boost the efficiency of your team and provide unparalleled services for clients.

Try a demo and see how we can unlock your firm’s potential!

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