Patenting an innovation can be difficult. So can managing a patent department's budget. Being selective and strategic
as to which maintenance fees are paid can help stretch patent budgets to be available to protect high-value innovations.
Attorneys can spend many hours making maintenance-fee-payment decisions and still feel as though it was a highly subjective
decision. IP Prism was developed to aggregate many different types of possibly data and to generate a single output variable
to predict whether a payment was or will be made. If a patent holder concludes that the tool is highly predictive of its
decisions, IP Prism may be used for sanity checks, starting points and/or amusement (e.g., to see how your decision would
compare to a score from an industry group).
Kate Gaudry is the founder of IP Prism. She is a practicing attorney with over a decade of experience in patent prosecution.
Kate developed IP Prism after recognizing how important maintenance-fee decisions were to management of patent departments’
budgets and portfolios. The tool was created to improve decision efficiency but is not to represent any legal advice. She
holds a PhD in computational neurobiology from UCSD and a JD from Harvard Law School.