We’re excited to announce that Clearstone FTO has been recently enhanced with powerful new features to greatly improve collaboration between patent counsel and R&D. These changes are already having a tremendous impact on our users’ ability to organize and share carefully curated information with numerous stakeholders in the patent clearance process, and have been referred to as “life-saving.”
The Clearstone FTO platform has always provided an efficient way for patent counsel to solicit and capture input from subject matter experts by using status indicators, comments, and review sharing functionality. Now, that capability goes further by utilizing the status indicators as a basis to define the scope of review by collaborators. Share recipients (“sharees”) now only see the patent documents for which their input is desired, and no others.
There are two new access-control profiles available within Clearstone FTO’s sharing functionality: Technical Review and Counsel Review.
With Technical Review, users can limit access within a particular patent review so that the sharee only sees patents that have at least one claim that is marked with status “Need Technical Info.” Any patent that does not have this status indicator among its claims will not be visible to the sharee. This access profile has been extremely useful for streamlined collaboration between attorneys and engineers, for example, so that engineers are not exposed to any more information than they need to see.
With Counsel Review, users can limit access within a particular patent review so that the sharee only sees patents that have at least one claim that is marked with status “Counsel Review.” Any patent that does not have this status indicator among its claims will not be visible to the sharee. This access profile has been helpful to identify and limit the patents that are sent to outside counsel for review (or from outside counsel to in-house counsel), for example, or when non-attorneys perform some part of the clearance process and wish to limit the scope of review by counsel.
These enhanced access profiles are available to all users with Professional or Team/Enterprise accounts and may be used with any collaborator, including sharees with Standard (free) accounts.
For more information, reach out to us at info@clearstoneip.com.