How to Automate Anaqua AQX

An IP portfolio is only as accurate as its docket

Anaqua AQX is intellectual property management software, and the people in front of it are IP operations staff: docketing specialists, paralegals, counsel inside a corporate legal department, and the law firms that file on their behalf. Anaqua sells it in two shapes, AQX Corporate for in-house departments and a law firm edition for the practices they instruct.

What it holds is a portfolio. Every patent family, every trademark, the applications still in prosecution, the licences, the agreements, the costs, and against all of it the dates. A patent is not a document a company owns outright. It is a right that survives only while fees are paid and responses filed on time, in every country where it is registered.

That makes the docket unlike other business records. An overdue invoice is a problem. A missed response deadline can extinguish an asset the company spent a decade building, and nothing restores it afterwards.

Status arrives from sixty patent offices, one at a time

The work around a docket is not thinking about patents. It is checking on them.

Somebody signs into a national patent office portal to see whether the office action everyone is waiting on has issued yet. Somebody checks whether the response filed last Tuesday was actually received, or whether the clerk bounced it over a formatting rule. Somebody reads a foreign associate's email, in a slightly different format from the last one, and types the new date into the docket. Somebody watches an opposition window on a trademark register, because the register will not tell you when it opens or when a third party files against a mark.

Then the fee side. A national office changes its schedule and the figure nobody re-checked is now wrong. A renewal instruction was acknowledged, or is still sitting somewhere.

Every one of those is a login, a search field and a person copying a date.

Anaqua AQX

Registers read before the summary arrives Each live application checked on the patent office's own system, so an action that issued on Monday is on the docket on Monday.

Filings followed to their outcome Whether a submission was accepted or bounced by the office, raised the same day, because a rejected filing is not a filing.

Two records of the same date, compared What the register shows set beside what the docket shows, weekly, while a disagreement is still a question rather than a lost right.

Automated docketing starts from mail that already landed

AQX is a serious system and it does a great deal of this already.

IP Operations covers automated docketing, built around the volume of email and documents an IP department actually receives. Portfolio Management classifies and organises the assets. Patent Management and Trademark Management run their respective lifecycles, with clearance and infringement tracking on the trademark side. Innovation Management brings invention disclosure into one place before an application exists. The Annuities Decision Workspace puts internal data, the licence position, active conflicts and AI-generated patent summaries on one screen, so a person deciding whether to renew or lapse sees the twenty-year cost, and Anaqua runs the payment as a service once that decision is made. Reporting and Analytics sits over the whole portfolio.

Read the list and the pattern is the one every system of record has. All of it begins with something already inside AQX, or with a document that arrived by email.

The registers themselves are outside. Dozens of patent and trademark offices each publish to their own website, on their own timetable, to whoever signs in and looks.

The register knows before the associate does

The register updates overnight and notifies nobody. It is read every morning instead, before the office opens.

Each live application checked on the office's own system, so an action that issued on Monday is on the docketing specialist's list on Monday rather than the day the associate's summary arrives. Filings followed to their outcome, so a rejected submission is raised the same day, because a rejected filing is not a filing and the clock did not stop for it. Trademark registers watched for oppositions, and for third-party marks close enough to yours to matter, while the window is still open.

The slower ones count just as much. Assignment recordation confirmed on the register rather than assumed. Published fee schedules re-read against what the budget assumed, so a change in one country is a line item and not a surprise. Status on a foreign associate's own portal set beside what the docket says, weekly, while a disagreement is still a question.

The boundary here is drawn by law rather than preference. Looking things up and comparing them can run unattended. Deciding, instructing, paying and filing stay with the people who answer for them.

A date gets verified, a renewal still gets authorised

Nothing above involves filing anything or paying anything, and that separation is the point. Verifying a date against the office that set it is clerical work. Acting on it is a professional judgement with a legal right attached.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the patent office, the trademark register, the associate's portal or the published fee schedule, reads what is on the screen, and brings back the comparison: what issued, what was rejected, what disagrees with the docket.

It never files, never instructs and never pays a renewal or annuity fee. Those are your decisions and your signature. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, restricted to the sites you allow.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.