Darwin Suite

Darwin Suite is an intellectual property platform developed by Techframe that covers the whole life cycle of IP rights: filing, prosecution, maintenance, monitoring, documents, deadlines, reporting and the collaboration between service providers and the rights holders they represent. Rather than one large program, it is a family of modular web systems that you use as one connected workspace.

Darwin Ignite is the IP management system for agents, attorneys and law firms; Darwin Lightbox lets portfolio owners and their service providers consult, review and annotate the same portfolio information; Darwin Axiom analyses, reviews and produces IP and legal documents; Darwin GSE searches trade marks, logos and slogans with artificial intelligence; and Darwin Genius screens new concepts for originality and registrability. All of them share one federated single sign-on, so you use the same email address and password everywhere, and one account structure, so your team, roles, subscriptions, billing, email sending accounts and AI keys are set up once and serve every system your account uses. The interface is available in six languages and each user chooses their own.

Darwin Suite serves legal services and IP agents, IP providers, corporate rights holders, government, academia and advertising and creative agencies, with a particularly strong presence in Portuguese-speaking jurisdictions and in Madrid Protocol work. You subscribe to the systems you need and can add others later without learning a new way of signing in.

Darwin Suite is developed by Techframe – Sistemas de Informação, SA, a Portuguese software company that has been delivering software for more than 20 years. Techframe is also the author of Darwin 5.1, the established client-server IP management system that many firms still use every day, so the web systems of the suite, Darwin Ignite, Darwin Lightbox, Darwin GSE and Darwin Axiom, build on long experience of how IP practices and rights holders actually work.

Techframe has three offices: its headquarters and support centre in Abrantes, in central Portugal; an office in the Lisbon area, at São Domingos de Rana; and an office in Madrid, Spain. Because the support centre sits at the headquarters, the requests you send through Contact support in the Help Centre go to Techframe itself rather than to a third party. Techframe – Sistemas de Informação, SA is also the data controller for the personal data processed in the suite, which is relevant if you have a data protection question.

You can read more about the suite and its systems at www.darwinsuite.com and write to Techframe at info@techframe.pt for general enquiries. The full addresses, telephone numbers and sales contacts are given in the question on contacting Techframe directly.

Darwin Suite is designed for everyone who files, manages, defends or relies on intellectual property rights. Its markets are legal services and IP agents, IP providers, corporate rights holders, government bodies, academia, and advertising and creative agencies. Within those markets it serves two sides of the same relationship.

Service providers, meaning IP agents, attorneys and law firms, run their daily work in Darwin Ignite, where they keep their clients' cases, register incoming correspondence, produce letters, watch bulletins and follow deadlines. Portfolio owners, such as brand owners, companies and in-house IP teams, use Darwin Lightbox to consult and annotate the portfolio their provider manages for them, without having to work inside the provider's operational system or ask for status updates by email. Both sides can also use Darwin GSE for AI-assisted trade mark, logo and slogan searches, Darwin Axiom for the analysis and production of IP and legal documents and, for creative and marketing teams, Darwin Genius to screen new concepts while they are being created.

The suite has a particularly strong presence in Portuguese-speaking jurisdictions, namely Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Macau, and in work under the Madrid Protocol, while its six interface languages make it usable by international teams. Whether you are a single practitioner or a large organisation, the plans of each system let you start small and grow.

Darwin Suite comprises five web systems.

Darwin Ignite is the IP management system for those who manage IP cases, whether service providers such as agents, attorneys and law firms or in-house teams that run their own portfolio. It covers the portfolio, entities, court cases, watches, publications, viabilities, incoming and outgoing documents, deadlines, reports and a performance dashboard. Darwin Lightbox is an IP consultation and annotation system (IPCAS) that supports the interaction and information sharing between IP portfolio owners and the service providers who manage their cases.

Darwin Axiom uses artificial intelligence to analyse, review and produce IP and legal documents, with every answer citing its source, for agents, lawyers, in-house teams and brand owners alike. Darwin GSE, the Graphical Search Engine, uses artificial intelligence to search trade marks, logos and slogans by visual, phonetic, conceptual and semantic similarity, for clearance, viability and monitoring. Darwin Genius screens new concepts for originality and registrability while they are still being created.

Alongside these, Darwin 5.1 is Techframe's established client-server IP management system, still used by many firms, and it can work with the web systems. Every system shares the same sign-on and account, and you can move between those your account uses from the Systems switcher in the user menu.

Darwin Ignite is the operational heart of the suite for service providers: it is where agents, attorneys and law firms keep and work their clients' IP cases day to day. In Ignite the provider records trade marks, patents, designs and other rights with their dates, parties, classes and history; manages the clients, applicants, agents and other parties in Entity Management; follows litigation in Court Case; monitors official bulletins in the Watch Section and the Publication List; requests viability studies; and keeps track of what falls due.

Incoming correspondence is registered through the document workflow drawer, which reads an email, PDF or scanned letter and proposes its classification, sender, summary, deadlines and the cases it mentions for a person to confirm, while outgoing letters and emails are produced from the case with Generate document. Reports, Scrum Boards and a performance dashboard complete the picture.

Ignite is also the source of what portfolio owners see in Darwin Lightbox: on the Lightbox tab of a client's entity the provider sets up a synchronisation, and the cases in which that entity plays the chosen role are copied to the client's Lightbox account. In this way the provider's record stays the master, and Lightbox becomes the shared window onto it. Which screens you see in Ignite depends on your role and your account's plan.

Darwin Lightbox is the suite's IP consultation and annotation system, or IPCAS. Its role is to be the window shared between IP portfolio owners and their service providers. Instead of asking for status updates by email or relying on spreadsheets and reports that are out of date as soon as they are sent, the owner signs in to Lightbox and consults the cases, entities and court cases the provider manages, with their general data, history, documents and life cycle graph, and a link to the official register where one exists.

Lightbox users can add annotations to a case to record instructions, decisions or questions, optionally marking them Private, and they can consult reports, see the Performance Dashboard and manage their own profile and team. They do not edit case data: what they see is a copy, and corrections are made by the provider in its own system and arrive at the next synchronisation.

The information is fed by Darwin Ignite, where the provider sets up a Lightbox sync on the client's entity, and Darwin 5.1 users can be served through the same model, depending on their provider's configuration. Lightbox runs on the same platform as the rest of the suite, with the same sign-on, profile, team, roles, security and Help Centre, but with its own branding and address.

The systems of Darwin Suite are built on one shared platform, so most of what you set up in one is already in place in the others. There is a single federated sign-on, so the same email address and password open every system. Accounts are shared across the suite: the same team and roles, subscriptions, billing details, email sending accounts and AI keys and models serve every system the account uses, and they are managed from the same Profile. You move between systems from the Systems switcher in the user menu, and between accounts from the Accounts switcher, without signing in again; the account you choose scopes all the data you see.

Information also flows between systems where that makes sense. Darwin Ignite holds the service provider's operational record, and a Lightbox sync set up on a client's entity copies the relevant cases to the client's Darwin Lightbox account, where they can be consulted and annotated. Darwin GSE carries out the AI trade mark, logo and slogan searching behind the viability requests made in Ignite and supports prior art and opposition work.

Darwin Axiom, which analyses and summarises legal documents, uses the same account, team and AI configuration as the others. Each system still needs its own subscription, chosen by the account's administrators in Subscriptions.

Darwin 5.1 is Techframe's established client-server IP management system, installed and used by many firms for their daily work long before the web systems of Darwin Suite existed. It remains in use, and a firm that runs Darwin 5.1 does not have to abandon it to benefit from the suite: it can keep its existing system and add web systems alongside it. Darwin Lightbox, in fact, was first offered to Darwin 5.1 customers, so that their clients could consult and annotate their portfolios on the web; depending on the provider's configuration, Lightbox can be fed from Darwin 5.1 in the same way as from Darwin Ignite, and the Brand Owner plan of Lightbox includes an option for integration with Darwin 5.1 or Darwin Ignite.

For firms that choose to move their work to Darwin Ignite, the path has been prepared: the Upload portfolio wizards and the spreadsheet loader bring cases into an Ignite account, and the OIL document generator converts Darwin 5.1 letter templates automatically, using over 650 known placeholder mappings and marking in red anything it cannot resolve so that you can finish it by hand. If you are a Darwin 5.1 customer considering the suite, the sales team can explain the options that suit your firm.

Yes. Darwin Suite is designed so that one account, with one team, can use several systems, and so that one user can belong to several accounts. To move between systems, open the user menu and use the Systems switcher; you stay signed in, and the same account, team, roles, billing, email sending accounts and AI configuration apply.

Each system is subscribed separately, so the systems available to your account depend on what its administrators have chosen in Subscriptions. If you open a system for which your account has no subscription, you are enrolled in it as a Reader, with read-only access, and the account's administrators are informed so that they can decide what to do.

Separately, the Accounts switcher in the same user menu lets you change the account you are working in, for example if you work for more than one firm, if a portfolio owner deals with several service providers, or if a provider serves several clients in Lightbox. The account you select determines all the data you see, and nothing from one account is visible while you are working in another. Your personal details, language and password belong to you as a user and follow you across every system and account.

The interface of Darwin Suite is available in six languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian. Each user chooses their own language in Profile, under Personal Account, so colleagues on the same account can each work in the language they prefer, and the choice applies in every system of the suite. The language you choose changes the menus, screens, messages and explanations, including the plain-language help shown beside dashboard headings and the content of the Help Centre. The data you record, such as case titles, descriptions and annotations, stays as it was written.

Beyond the interface, the suite is built for multilingual work. In Darwin Ignite, letter templates are kept per language and the document generator always takes the language of the recipient into account when it proposes a template, so a client receives correspondence in their own language, with dates written out in full in that language.

When an incoming document is registered, the summary is produced in the reader's language whatever language the original was written in, while a drafted reply follows the language of the document being answered. Translations of new template descriptions are also prepared with the account's own AI configuration.