For over 10 years, large corporations, small and medium sized enterprises, and individuals have relied on Franks & Co for renewal and maintenance of patents, trade marks and designs throughout the world.
Here are five reasons why you should use Franks & Co's renewals and maintenance service for your intellectual property cases:
You want to use a single supplier for all your patents, trade mark and design maintenance.
We offer an "all under one roof" service for your whole portfolio of intellectual property including patents, trade marks, designs and utility models. Full listings of all your cases help you manage your whole portfolio, and see at a glance your intellectual property on a country by country basis.
You want to use a firm that has 20 years experience in maintenance of intellectual property rights of all types, globally.
Franks & Co has over 10 years experience in the payment of maintenance fees and renewal fees globally at national and regional Patent Offices throughout the world. Our staff are experienced, tried and tested.
You want control over your IP budget costs.
Franks & Co can provide accurate estimates of the coming years intellectual property renewal costs in advance. By providing a listing of all your intellectual property renewals and costs at once, annual budgets can be allocated, without any surprises. Both the amount and timing of invoices is predictable, giving you control over your intellectual property budget costs. At any time, you can vary your instructions to cancel intellectual property cases, if budgets dictate.
You want to reduce administration in your office.
Franks & Co provide case listings of all your intellectual property cases categorised by intellectual property type or by country, allowing you to see your global intellectual property protection on a country by country basis at a glance. You can instruct us by a single instruction annually, indicating which cases are to be maintained and which cases are to be abandoned. Franks & Co systems reduce the burden of record keeping in your office, a particular benefit for small and medium sized enterprises.
You want a proven track record of reliability and dependability.
Our renewals administration team consist of administrators who are qualified by the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys, and the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents, and includes European Trade Mark Attorneys, European Patent Attorneys and Chartered Patent Attorneys. Our staff turn over is low, and our systems are robust, reliable, tried and tested.
Our maintenance and renewals department is situated at our Head Office in Sheffield.
Franks & Co can be instructed to manage your maintenance and renewal fees only, leaving your existing advisors in place for prosecution of the pending cases.
Alternatively, where you use Franks & Co for all matters, both pending and granted, this avoids having the pending cases dealt with by a different firm and in a different location to your granted intellectual property cases. All of your patent, trade mark, design and other intellectual property cases including renewals and maintenance fees can be dealt with all under one roof as a one stop shop service.
In our maintenance department, all renewals are overseen by the correctly qualified persons. It is important that your patent and design renewals are handled by an experienced CPA (Chartered Patent Attorney) or EPA (European Patent Attorney) and your trade mark renewals are handled by an experienced European Trade Mark Attorney or UK Trade Mark Attorney.
Our internal computerised systems are simple, tested and robust, and are backed up by a paper diary system. Further, for each intellectual property renewal, we maintain a physical hard copy file containing original patent office documentation, so as to evidence a paper trail and avoid the risk of a missed payment of a properly instructed maintenance fee.
You can instruct us for various levels of service including:
- Renew by default – we receive your global instruction to renew intellectual property cases as they come up for renewal, as a default condition. We pay the fee and send you our invoice in the normal course of business. If you wish to terminate any intellectual property case, then we terminate renewal payments once we have received your instruction. This is by far the most administratively convenient way of maintaining your intellectual property portfolio.
- Pay on request – we issue a reminder to you every time an intellectual property case comes up for renewal. We pay the renewal fee when we receive your instructions, with the default condition that if no instructions are received, then the renewal fee is not paid. This service is popular with smaller clients, and clients who have rapidly changing product lines.
- Full service trade marks portfolio management- for trade marks, instructing us for management of all matters both pending and granted, has the advantage that we can review each mark as it comes up for renewal, and inform you whether any consolidation of legacy single class trade marks can be made to multi class marks, or whether multiple individual foreign marks, for example in European nation states, can be consolidated into a single multi class European Trade Mark registration. Portfolio consolidation and clean up makes management of rights simpler and more cost effective in the long run.
- Client specific - for clients with large portfolios we can work to a specific customer defined set of instructions to suit the particular needs of your portfolio.