Darwin Ignite

Rather than typing your existing cases one by one, use Upload portfolio from the side menu, which offers three ways in under Choose your option. Portfolio Agents (Identify official agents) starts from your firm: you choose jurisdictions and identify the names under which your practice appears as official agent in the national registers, and Ignite finds the processes filed under them. Portfolio Applicants (Identify process holders) starts from the holders of the rights: you identify applicants in the registers, such as your clients or your own company, and Ignite finds the processes recorded in their name. Load files (Load process files) starts from a spreadsheet of processes you already have, using templates you can download. All three end the same way: you choose which processes to bring in, give the GDPR approval for the personal data they contain, check a summary and choose Finish. Ignite then confirms that the selected processes are now being loaded into this account portfolio. Loading runs in the background, and how long it takes depends on how much you load. Each plan includes a number of free uploads of processes from official institutes, and the number of processes your account can hold also depends on the plan. Loading processes requires the Contributor or Admin role.

The Portfolio Agents wizard builds your portfolio from the registers by finding the processes in which your firm is the official agent, in a series of steps. In Identification of jurisdictions you choose the jurisdictions to search, moving them from those available to be selected to those selected. In Identification of official agents you search the registers of those jurisdictions for the names under which your practice is recorded as agent; include former names, spelling variants and individual attorneys, because registers often record the same firm in several ways. In Validation of agents you confirm which of the names found really are yours, so that another firm's processes are not brought in. In Process validation you see the processes found and choose which to load; this is where the load is counted against the free uploads from official institutes included in your plan, and Ignite warns you if you go beyond them. In GDPR approval you give the approval for the personal data the processes contain. The Resume step summarises what will be loaded, and Finish starts the load, with the message that the selected processes are now being loaded into this account portfolio. While it runs, Ignite shows progress by country: the countries processed, those still processing and any that could not be loaded.

The Portfolio Applicants wizard works like the Portfolio Agents wizard, but it starts from the holders of the rights rather than from your firm. It suits a rights holder loading its own portfolio, or a practice bringing in the portfolio of a particular client as recorded in the client's name in the registers. The steps are Identification of jurisdictions, where you choose the jurisdictions to search; Identification of applicants, where you search the registers for the applicant names, including former names, subsidiaries and spelling variants, since registers do not always record a company the same way; Validation of applicants, where you confirm which of the names found are the right ones, so that a namesake's rights are not brought in; Process validation, where you choose which of the processes found to load, counted against the free uploads from official institutes included in your plan; GDPR approval, for the personal data the processes contain; and Resume, which summarises the load before you choose Finish. Ignite then confirms that the selected processes are now being loaded into this account portfolio and shows progress by country while the load runs in the background. If some of a client's rights are handled by other agents, review the list carefully in Process validation and load only those your practice should manage.

Yes. In Upload portfolio choose Load files (Load process files). Begin with Download Templates, which offers a Simple and a Complete spreadsheet, each either Empty or as a filled Example showing how each column should be completed. Typical columns are the type of right (trade mark, patent or design), Country, Type, File Number, Designation, Description, Owner, Request Date, Class, Image, Mnemonic and GDPR. Keep the columns as they are, leave no empty rows and do not use single quotes in the text. The load then goes through File Upload, File Conversion, Editing and Reviewing Entries, GDPR Selection and Resume. Ignite checks the file as it converts it and tells you plainly if the file is not valid, if a column is missing, if no data could be found or if there are empty lines. In the review step each entry is marked, for example Processed, Not Processed or NOT FOUND, and problems such as an invalid date or an invalid character are flagged so that you can correct them on screen, or add entries with Add Line; entries missing essential information are ignored and counted. Where an uploaded value differs from what is already on file, Ignite warns you and keeps the value on file. After the GDPR step and the summary, the processes are loaded in the background, and the free uploads of your plan apply.

Because the records you are about to load contain personal data. IP files name people: individual applicants and holders, inventors, representatives and the contacts of companies. Under the General Data Protection Regulation, personal data may only be processed when there is a lawful basis for it, such as a contract with the client, a legal obligation or a legitimate interest, and an organisation must be able to show that it has considered this. The GDPR approval step, which appears in the Portfolio Agents and Portfolio Applicants wizards and, as GDPR Selection and GDPR Approval, when you load files, asks you to confirm that approval for the processes and parties you are bringing in. Ignite records the approval with the load, so your account keeps a trace of when and for what the personal data was brought in, which is useful if you are ever asked to account for it. Data that is already public in the official registers is still personal data under the GDPR, which is why the step appears even when the processes come from the registers. If you are unsure whether you can give the approval for some records, leave them out and load them later, once you have checked with whoever handles data protection in your organisation. Questions about how Techframe handles personal data can be sent to its data protection contact.

Loading runs in the background, so you can carry on working while it proceeds, and how long it takes depends on the size of the load: a few processes in one jurisdiction appear far sooner than thousands spread across many. While a wizard load runs, Ignite shows its progress by country, listing the countries processed, those still processing and any that could not be loaded; if a country fails, contact support from the Help Centre with the details. Once the processes are in, you find them in Portfolio Management with Search Processes. Dashboard figures that depend on them, such as the performance indicators and the map, are prepared overnight, so they reflect a new load the next day. Your plan shapes how much you can load in two ways. Each plan includes a number of free uploads of processes from official institutes: 100 on Free, 250 on Core, 1,000 on Prime and 5,000 on Corporate. If a load goes beyond the free allowance, Ignite warns you before going ahead: on the Free plan you are asked to change your plan to import more, and on the other plans further imports are charged. Separately, each plan has a maximum number of processes the account can hold, which you can check in Subscriptions.

Open Portfolio Management from the side menu; its search screen is Search Processes. You can combine filters such as Applicant, Clients, Title/Epigraph, Modality, Jurisdiction, Status, Representative, Next Action, Reference and File Number, date ranges for Deposit Date, Publication Date, Grant Date, Refusal Date and Next Action Date, and classifications: Nice, Vienna Categories, Locarno and International Classification. Where it is available, Natural Language Search lets you describe what you are looking for in your own words, typed or dictated, instead of filling in each filter. Choose See Results to view the matches in Card View, Table View or Map View; Table View is the most compact for long lists, and Select All Records lets you act on the whole set, for example with Print Document. Back to Filters returns you to the search with your criteria kept. Opening a case shows its full record, and Previous case and Next case move you through the results without going back to the list. If nothing matches, the screen says so plainly, which usually means a filter is too narrow. For a quick lookup when you already know a reference, number or name, use the global search in the header, available on every screen. Results are always limited to the account selected in the user menu.

An IP case opens on five tabs. General is the record of the right itself: its Modality, File number, Reference, Internal Number and Client Reference, Jurisdiction, official State and Internal State; the dates (deposit, publication, grant, refusal and others, with the publication bulletin where relevant); the entities involved, such as client, applicant and representative, and for patents the inventors; the Next action and Next Deadline; the classes (Nice with its goods and services, Vienna, Locarno or international classification); the image; Vigilance and Warnings; the Life Cycles; and Observations. Annotations holds notes about the case with their date and author, which can be marked Private. Evolution is the history of the case in two parts: Action, the acts done or due with their limit and execution dates, service, quantities and amounts, and Invoice, the invoices raised. Documents lists the documents filed against the case, whether incoming, outgoing or internal, with their type, classification, dates, subject, entity, correspondent, AI summary and deadline. Logs records who did what to the case and when. From the case you can also Show lifecycle graph, open the file in the registration office, Generate document with OIL, and move to the Previous case or Next case of your search.

To edit a case, open it from Search Processes and switch the General tab into edit mode. You can then change its details and dates, the entities table (adding or removing rows for client, applicant, representative and the other roles), the Nice classes, which you can add by class number or by typing a product or service description, the Vienna, Locarno and international classifications, descriptions, observations and the life cycle type. Fields marked with an asterisk are required, and the case cannot be saved while one is missing. Save keeps your changes and Cancel discards them; if you try to close with unsaved changes, Ignite asks before throwing them away. Editing requires the Contributor or Admin role: a Reader can open every tab but cannot change anything. Every change is recorded on the Logs tab with the date, the user and the action, so the trail of who changed what is kept. Deleting a case is a different matter. Ignite asks you to confirm that you really want to delete the process, and you should treat a deletion as permanent; whether you may delete depends on your role and on how your account is organised. If a right has lapsed, been refused or been transferred, it is usually better to record its new status, which keeps its history, than to delete it.

Opening a new IP case is done in two steps. From Portfolio Management you start a new case, and Ignite first asks which type of right it is, for example a trade mark, a patent or a design, so that it shows the right form. In the first step you enter the essential details and save; the case is then held with a provisional status, and Ignite confirms that the new process was saved. In the second step you complete the record, with its dates, entities, classes, image and the rest of the General tab, and the case takes its place in the portfolio. If you leave a new case unfinished, Ignite remembers it: the next time you start one, it tells you that an unsaved process was found and asks you to save it, or cancel it to create a new one. Closing the form without saving deletes the unsaved details, after asking you. Creating cases requires the Contributor or Admin role, and the number of processes your account can hold depends on your plan. A case can also be opened from the document workflow drawer: when an incoming document mentions a right that is not in your portfolio, it is shown in red with the option to open a case for it, linked to the client, when you save the document. To bring in many existing cases at once, use Upload portfolio instead.

Annotations are notes attached to an IP case: an instruction received by phone, a decision taken in a meeting, a question to follow up or the reasoning behind a step. You find them on the Annotations tab of the case, where each is listed with its date and the user who wrote it, so the tab reads as a dated history of the conversation around the right. Choose New Annotation, write the text and use Add annotation to save it; you can later update or delete an annotation, expand a long one to read it in full, and Delete all Annotations clears the case's notes after a warning. Adding and changing annotations requires the Contributor or Admin role. Each annotation can be marked Private. When your client follows the portfolio through Darwin Lightbox, annotations can be shared with them there where the configuration allows it, and the client can annotate the same case in return, which makes annotations a practical channel for instructions and replies. Mark an annotation Private whenever it is meant for your own team only, such as internal deliberations, fee discussions or notes about the client, and it stays within your account. Annotations are never public. As good practice, keep each annotation to one subject, state decisions and dates clearly, and do not record more personal data than the matter needs.

The Evolution tab is the working history of a case, kept in two parts. Action lists the acts: each row has an Act ID and the act itself, its Act Limit Date (the date by which it must be done), its Act Date and Act Exec Date, the Service, Quantity, Unit and Unit price, whether it is Invoiceable, the External costs, Official Taxes and Office fees, the Act total, the entity concerned, observations and an attached file where there is one. Invoice lists the invoices raised for the case with their number, date, value, currency, description and observations. You add a row with Add row and can update or delete rows; maintaining them requires the Contributor or Admin role. The tab matters beyond the record itself. An act with a limit date that has not been executed is a pending act, and pending acts are combined with the case's next valid date to give the Next Deadline shown on screens and coloured as it approaches. The same acts feed the Deadlines card on the dashboard's Operations tab, which counts acts past due and acts executed in the period, and acts marked as invoiceable feed the Rentability indicator, which separates your fees from disbursements. Court cases have an Evolution tab of their own, which works in the same way for litigation.

On an IP case, Show lifecycle graph opens the Theoretical life cycle of the right, and Hide lifecycle graph closes it again. The graph draws the steps a right of that kind normally goes through in its jurisdiction, from filing through examination, publication and grant to the renewals or annuities that keep it alive, with the time between steps expressed in days, months or years. Each box is either a State the right can be in or a Condition that decides the next step, with the branches marked Condition met and Condition not met, so you can see not only the usual route but also what happens if, for example, an opposition is filed or a payment is missed. The graph shows where the case stands and the date of the previous step, which helps you explain to a client what comes next and when. Hold Ctrl and use the mouse wheel to zoom in on a long life cycle. It is a theoretical model built from rules, not a record of what has actually happened to the case: the case's own dates and its Evolution tab remain the authority. Life cycles are available for trade marks and patents in all jurisdictions, and for all modalities in jurisdictions whose bulletins are processed; where none is defined, Ignite says that no life cycle is defined for this case.

The Next Deadline shown for a case combines two sources: the case's next valid date, which is the next occasion on which the right has to be kept alive, such as a renewal or an annuity, and the pending acts on its Evolution tab, meaning acts with a limit date that have not yet been executed. So an instruction with a limit date next week comes before a renewal due next year. As the date approaches, the deadline is coloured according to the margin configured for your account: Normal while there is time, Critical when it is close and Overdue once it has passed, in search results and on the case alike. You can also search by Next Action and Next Action Date in Search Processes to list what is coming up. On the Dashboard, the Operations tab gives two further views: the Deadlines card counts the acts that fell due in the period and are still not executed, and those executed, across IP cases and court cases, while What falls due looks ahead month by month at the dates on which rights must be kept alive. Court cases carry their own next deadline in the same way. Deadlines also arrive with your post: when you register a document in the document workflow drawer, the deadlines found in it are proposed and the nearest becomes its Due By date.

A case can carry the classifications that apply to its type of right. Trade marks use the Nice Classification of goods and services: you can add a class by its number or by typing a product or service description, and Ignite helps you find the right class from that description. The goods and services are recorded per class, and classes can be active or inactive, so a class no longer protected stays visible in the record. Figurative marks can also carry Vienna classes, which describe the figurative elements of the image, such as a star, an animal or a shape, and which you can search and add from the case. Designs use the Locarno Classification, and patents an international classification. Each list can be maintained a row at a time, and Delete all clears it after a warning. Classes are more than a description. They are filters in Search Processes, where you can search by Nice, Vienna Categories, Locarno and International Classification; they are what the watches compare with newly published marks, together with any associated classes you configure; they can restrict the content of reports; and OIL templates can include them in letters, one by one and aggregated, with Nice classes active and inactive. Keeping them accurate therefore improves your searches, your watch results and your correspondence.

Yes. On an IP case, View File in Registration Office opens the record of that case in the online register of the IP office concerned, so you can compare your own details with the official ones without searching for the case again on the office's website. The link depends on the office publishing an online register that can be reached that way, so it is available for some jurisdictions and not for others. It is a link for consultation only: Ignite reads public registers and bulletins, but nothing you change in Ignite is sent to the office, and filings, payments and responses are still made through the office's own channels. When you are working through a list of results, Previous case and Next case move you from one case to the next in the order of your search, which makes it quick to check a series of cases against the register one after another. Back to Selected Cases returns you to the list, and Back to Filters takes you back to the search criteria. Court cases have equivalent Previous court case and Next court case buttons. If you find a difference between your record and the register, correct your case on the General tab or, if you believe the office's data is wrong, take it up with the office.

Litigation is kept in Court Case, separately from the IP cases it may concern. The search screen lets you filter by Client, Country, Process, Process Reference, Internal Reference, State, Court, Judge, Representative, Next Action and Next Action Date, and First Notification, Last Notification and Decision dates, and shows the results in Card View, Table View or Map View. A court case opens on three tabs. General Data holds the Title, Process Reference, Country, Process, Court Proc. Number, Internal Reference, State, Court, Judge and Responsible; the dates, such as the first and last notification and decision dates; the Client and Representative; a table of entities with their role, correspondent and comments; Observations; and a timeline of the matter. Evolution holds the acts and invoices of the proceedings, and Documents the documents filed against it. Each court case has a Next Deadline, coloured Normal, Critical or Overdue as it approaches. Use Enter edit mode to make changes, then Save or Cancel; Delete court case removes it after confirmation. Previous court case and Next court case move through your results. Acts on court cases count in the dashboard's Deadlines card and, when chargeable, in Rentability, and the person named as Responsible is the one they count for under Personal.

Entity Management is where you keep the parties your work involves: clients, applicants and holders, representatives and agents, opposing parties and any other organisation or person who appears on your cases. You can search by Name, Mnemonic, Role, Responsible, Process Number, Business Group, Country, Language, Currency, Id and Status (Active or Inactive), view the results in Card View or Table View, and select all records or print them. Opening an entity shows its full record, and Previous and Next move through your results. You can create new entities, edit them and, after confirming, delete them; changing entities requires the Contributor or Admin role. An entity is linked to IP cases and court cases through the roles it plays on them, such as client, applicant or representative, which is why searching by Process Number or Role is a quick way to find who is behind a case. Entities are used across Ignite: OIL takes the recipient of a letter, its email address and its language from the entity and its correspondents; the document workflow drawer matches the sender of an incoming document against them; the dashboard counts your applicants and clients; and the Lightbox tab of an entity is where you share that client's portfolio with them in Darwin Lightbox.

An entity record is organised in tabs. General Data holds the identity of the party: its Number, Name and Acronym (its mnemonic), Address, Locality, Postal Code and Country, TIN, Language and Currency, business group, the colleague responsible for it, whether it is an SME, its working hours, and its vigilance preferences, that is, whether it wants international, national or regional watching and whether it is contacted by email. Financial Data holds the commercial terms, such as price table, discount, ceiling, risk, VAT code, days to pay and receive and reminders, together with the entity's bank accounts. Contacts lists the ways of reaching the entity, each with its type and observations. Correspondents lists the people at the entity you correspond with, each with their own details and contacts. Documents lists the documents filed against the entity. Lightbox holds the synchronisations that share the entity's cases with a Darwin Lightbox account, each with Active, Role, Lightbox Account and Comments. Logs records the changes made to the record, by whom and when. The language and the correspondents deserve particular care, because they decide in which language OIL writes to the entity and to which address it sends, and the vigilance preferences are taken into account when watches decide what is worth bringing to the client.

Both are kept on the entity record. The Contacts tab lists the ways of reaching the entity as a whole: each contact has a Type, such as telephone or email, the Contact itself, the contact name and Observations. You can add, edit and delete contacts one at a time, or clear them all after a warning; when there are none, the tab says so. The Correspondents tab lists the people at the entity you actually write to, for example the head of a client's legal department or its brand manager. Each correspondent has a Treatment (the form of address used in letters), Name, Language, Mobile Phone, Email, Address, Locality, Country, postal code and Observations, with Details and Contacts tabs of their own. Keeping correspondents accurate pays off in OIL. When you generate a document, you choose the entity and the correspondent it is addressed to; the email address is taken from the correspondent first and from the entity second, and if neither has one, OIL tells you. The recipient's language decides which templates are offered, because templates exist per language. Correspondents also appear on IP cases and court cases beside the entity in each role, and the document workflow drawer matches the sender of an incoming document against them, offering to create a correspondent on save when the sender is not found.

The Financial Data tab of an entity holds the commercial terms on which you work with that party and the details you need to pay it or be paid. You can record its Price Table, Discount and Ceiling, a Risk classification, the VAT Code, whether it is handled under client management or supply management, Reminders, and the Days to pay and Days to receive. Below that you keep its bank accounts: for each one the Bank, Agency, Bank Account, IBAN, SWIFT and Observations, with one marked as the default; you can add, update and delete them, and Ignite asks before changing the default. This information supports the billing side of your case work. Acts on the Evolution tab of IP cases and court cases carry a service, quantity, unit price and amounts and can be marked as invoiceable, invoices are recorded against the case, and the dashboard's Rentability indicator separates your fees from disbursements; keeping each client's price table and terms on the entity helps you value that work consistently. Ignite is not an accounting system, however: it does not keep your ledger, calculate taxes or replace your invoicing software, so use these details alongside the financial tools your firm already has. Who can see and edit financial data depends on your role.

An entity is linked to a case through the role it plays on it. On the General tab of an IP case, the entities table lists each party with its role, such as client, applicant or representative, the correspondent to address there, whether the link is active, and comments; patents also record their inventors. The same entity can play different roles on different cases, and one case can involve several entities in the same role, for example co-applicants. Court cases have an entities table of their own. The roles matter well beyond the record. The applicant is whose name the right stands in and the client is who is billed, and in an agency practice they are often different, which is why the dashboard's stratification radar can be drawn for either. Applicants are what the Efficiency indicator matches to the public registers. When a client's portfolio is shared through Darwin Lightbox, the entity's Lightbox tab states the role in which it must appear for a case to be synchronised, and OIL proposes the client as a document's recipient by default. Separately, each case has a case responsible: the colleague in your account answerable for it, not an outside party. That is who the case counts for when a colleague turns on the Personal switch on the dashboard's Operations tab, so cases with nobody named only appear in the practice totals.

Open Entity Management and start a new entity. Fill in its General Data, completing at least the required fields, and save; Ignite confirms that the new entity was saved, and you can then complete its Contacts, Correspondents, Financial Data and other tabs. If you close the form before saving, Ignite warns you that the unsaved details will be deleted. To add a contact person or another way of reaching an existing client, open that client and use its Contacts or Correspondents tab rather than creating a new entity. Before creating anything, search first by name, mnemonic or tax number, and try variants of the name, because a second record for the same client splits its cases, documents and history between two entries, and Ignite does not merge them for you. Creating entities requires the Contributor or Admin role. New parties can also be created from the document workflow drawer. When the sender of an incoming document is not found in your account, the form shows it in red with the note that the correspondent was not found in the account and will be created on save; when you confirm the document it is created, and Ignite lists the entities and correspondents it created for that document. Check such records afterwards in Entity Management and complete any details the document could not provide.

The Watch Section is where Darwin Ignite monitors official bulletins for newly published applications that may conflict with the signs in your portfolio, so that you can warn your clients and oppose in time. Its main list shows each watched bulletin with its Origin, the Publication Date and the Opposition Deadline, followed by the number of hits Detected, Proposed, Accepted and Sent, whether the bulletin has been Processed, and who processed it and when (Processed by, Processed in). From the menu you also reach the watch Configuration, where the similarity thresholds, Notorious Trademarks, Associated Classes, automation and outputs are set per jurisdiction, the Analysis graphs, which show how quickly and how successfully your team deals with bulletins, and the watch Documents. The comparison between published marks and yours is done by the same search engine that powers Darwin GSE, using text and images. How many jurisdictions you can watch, and whether alerts are simple or detailed, depends on your plan: Free covers one jurisdiction with simple alerts, Core three, Prime five and Corporate ten, all with detailed alerts, and Core and above also watch internet domains. Which bulletins are available depends on the official bulletins processed for each jurisdiction. The Operations tab of the Dashboard summarises the bulletins still to analyse and the proposals already sent.

Open a bulletin from the Watch Section list to see its hits: each published sign that the system found similar to one in your portfolio. For every hit you see the published sign, its registration number and classes beside your own internal sign, Nice classes and internal number, your reference and the similarity percentage, so you can judge the conflict at a glance. Work through the list and mark the hits you consider relevant as selected, then as proposed when you put them forward to the client as possible oppositions. The counters on the bulletin keep score: Detected is what the system found, Proposed what you put forward, Accepted what was taken forward and Sent how many proposals have actually gone out. Keep an eye on the Opposition Deadline column, which tells you how long remains to act on each bulletin; the Operations tab of the Dashboard also lists the bulletins still to analyse. When you have finished, the bulletin is recorded as Processed with your name and the date, so colleagues know it has been dealt with. Hits above the selection threshold arrive already selected, and proposals can be sent to the client automatically if the jurisdiction's automation is switched on. Marking and processing hits requires a Contributor or Admin role; Readers can consult the results.

Both percentages are similarity thresholds, set separately for each jurisdiction in the watch Configuration, and together they decide how much of a bulletin you have to read. Min % of Detection is the floor: a published sign whose similarity to one of your signs falls below it is not shown at all, so raising it removes noise and lowering it widens the net. Min % of Selection is the level at which a hit arrives already selected for you, ready to be proposed, so your team starts from the strongest conflicts and only has to look at the rest. Hits between the two values are shown but left for a person to decide. The trade-off is the usual one: thresholds that are too high risk missing a conflict that a client would have wanted to oppose, while thresholds that are too low bury the real conflicts in weak similarities and lengthen processing time. A sensible approach is to start with moderate values, then use the Analysis graphs, especially the success rate and the time to process, to see whether your team is discarding most hits (raise the values) or finding conflicts only by looking below the selection level (lower it). Because each jurisdiction has its own configuration, you can be stricter where bulletins are large and more generous where a miss would be costly. Changing the configuration usually requires an Admin or Contributor role.

Both options are found in the watch Configuration and widen the comparison beyond a simple class-by-class match. Notorious Trademarks are the marks in your portfolio that you designate as well known: because a well-known mark can be protected against similar signs even for unrelated goods and services, a mark marked as notorious is compared with publications in every class, not only in the classes it is registered in. Use it sparingly, for your clients' genuinely famous marks, since every notorious mark adds hits from the whole bulletin. Associated Classes let you declare that certain classes are related, so a publication in one is also compared with your marks in the other; a typical case is goods and the retail or advertising services that relate to them, or neighbouring classes where confusion is likely in practice. Without them, a mark registered for clothing would not be compared with a new application covering the sale of clothing, for example. Both settings increase the number of hits Detected, so you may want to review your detection and selection percentages after switching them on. They are configured per account and jurisdiction, and changing them usually requires an Admin or Contributor role.

Yes. In the watch Configuration of each jurisdiction you choose how proposals reach the people who need them. Automation can be set to No Automation, where nothing goes out until a person sends it, to immediate, where proposals are sent as soon as hits are proposed, or to automatic a chosen number of days before the deadline, which gives your team time to review while guaranteeing that nothing is left too late. The output can go to the Client, to the case Manager inside your practice, to a Trusted Relationship where your account has one with a partner using another Darwin system, or simply to a File kept with the bulletin. For email output you set the From address, chosen from the sending accounts configured in Profile > Documents and email accounts, and the To, Cc and Bcc recipients, each of which can include the Manager, the Client or other addresses you add, together with the email template to be used. The number of editable email templates depends on your plan: five on Free, and unlimited on Core and above, which come with pre-configured templates. Every proposal sent is counted in the Sent column of the bulletin. Automatic sending relies on the client's contact having an email address in Entity Management, so it is worth checking contacts before switching it on.

The Publication List shows the incidences published in official bulletins that affect your own cases, such as instruction requests, grants, refusals and other acts of the office, so that you learn of them without reading every bulletin yourself. Each incidence shows the bulletin and Publication Section, the Registry Number, the sign and type, the Official Status alongside your Internal Status, the Nice classes, the applicant, observations and whether it has been processed. Review each one, decide what action it calls for, for example informing the client, preparing a response or updating the case, and mark it as processed so colleagues know it has been dealt with. Its Configuration works like the Watch Section: email output with From, To, Cc and Bcc addressed to the Manager, the Client or others, a Trusted Relationship option, and an automatic mode that either detects only, leaving the case for a person to update, or detects and updates the case automatically. Automatic updating of case files is included on the Prime and Corporate plans, and the number of jurisdictions covered depends on the plan (one on Free, three on Core, five on Prime, ten on Corporate). The Publication Analysis graphs show how quickly publications are processed, and the Operations tab of the Dashboard summarises the publications awaiting attention. Coverage depends on which official bulletins are processed for each jurisdiction.

The Analysis pages of the Watch Section and of the Publication List turn your monitoring work into figures you can manage. Time to process shows how many days your team takes, on average, to process a bulletin after it is published, which tells you whether work is keeping pace with the bulletins arriving. Average response time measures how long it takes from a hit or incidence being available to a proposal or communication going out to the client. Success rate shows how much of what was proposed was taken forward, a good indicator of whether your thresholds are well set and your proposals are relevant to clients. Each graph comes in a comparison view, which sets recent months side by side, and an evolution view over the last 12 months, and indicators tell you whether the current figure is above or below what was projected. Use them to spot a backlog before it becomes a missed opposition deadline, to balance work between colleagues, to judge the effect of changing detection and selection percentages, and to report to partners or clients on the service you provide. The figures cover only the bulletins and jurisdictions configured in your account, so they become meaningful once you have a few months of activity.

A viability request asks whether a new brand can be registered before your client invests in it. In Viabilities you enter a Reference, the Requester and a control email, the language in which you want the results, the Brand Expression or New Identity (the word, logo or slogan to be checked), the Nice classes of interest, which you can also find by describing the products, and the jurisdictions to search, then accept the terms and conditions. Depending on the depth you need, the request can be a quick Screening, a Positioned Screening or a full Viability Search. The searching itself is done by Darwin GSE, the suite's AI search engine for words and images, which compares the proposed brand with prior rights in the chosen registers and identifies potential conflicts and opposition risks. Each request appears in the Viabilities list with its expression, classes, jurisdictions, requester, language and status, so you can follow it until the results are ready and then use them to advise your client. The results support a professional opinion; they do not replace it. Some searches and expert-authenticated analyses consume credits, Silver first and then Gold, according to your plan, and the jurisdictions available depend on the registers covered.

Darwin GSE (Graphical Search Engine) is the Darwin Suite system that searches trade marks, logos and slogans with artificial intelligence, comparing both text and images, for viability (registrability) checks, prior-art searches and oppositions. It is a separate system in the suite, with its own plans and Silver and Gold credits, and it can be used on its own by anyone who needs to clear a brand. In Darwin Ignite it works behind the scenes: the viability requests you place in Viabilities are carried out by the GSE engine, and the comparison of newly published marks with your portfolio in the Watch Section uses the same technology, so you get the benefit without leaving Ignite. Because the whole suite shares one sign-on and one account, you can also open GSE directly from the Systems switcher in the user menu with the same email and password, and your team, billing and credits are the same account's. If your account has no GSE subscription, joining it enrols you as Reader and informs the account's administrators. GSE also offers expert-authenticated analyses carried out by a person, paid with Gold credits. Plans and what each includes are shown in Subscriptions; for prices, see Subscriptions or contact the sales team.

Use the Document Workflow button in the header, which is available on every screen. Drag the document, whether an email saved from your mail program, a PDF, a scanned letter or an image, onto the button: the drawer opens straight onto the registration form, the document is shown in a preview beside it, and the system starts reading it with your account's own AI model, showing its progress and an estimate of the time it needs. When the reading finishes the form is already filled in: on the General tab the date, type, reference, subject, nature, entity and correspondent, summary, classification and Due By date, and on the IP Cases tab every case the document mentions. The form has three steps, Analyse, Process and Close. Check and correct what was read, tick Private if the document should stay restricted, and press Confirm; then choose what happens next, such as closing the matter or forwarding it to a colleague, and press Proceed. The Close step tells you whether any new IP cases, entities or correspondents were created. If the reading service fails or a long document exceeds the time limit, you can fill in the form by hand. Clicking the button instead of dragging opens the list of documents, where you can open any registered document to consult it.

When you drop a document on the Document Workflow button, the system reads it, together with its annexes where possible, and proposes everything needed to register it. It identifies the document date, type and reference and its subject, and proposes a classification from your account's list of document classes; when nothing fits it opens a new class for your account and translates its name into the six interface languages. It works out who sent it, as the entity and the correspondent, and matches them against your existing contacts. It writes a summary in your own interface language, whatever language the document is in, so a German office action can be summarised in Portuguese for a Portuguese colleague. It picks out any deadlines, setting the nearest one explicitly stated as the Due By date. And it lists every IP case mentioned, trade marks, patents, designs or other rights, matching each against your portfolio first by jurisdiction and number, then by jurisdiction and title, and showing its real current status. The reading uses your account's own AI provider, model and API keys, set in Profile > API Keys & Models, and every call is metered and visible on the Artificial intelligence tab of the Dashboard. Everything is a proposal: you check and correct the form before confirming.

Nothing is invented and nothing is silently dropped: anything the system cannot find in your account is shown in red so you can decide. If the sender is not one of your entities, its name is still filled in with the message 'Entity not found in account, it will be created on save', and the same applies to an unknown correspondent; when you confirm, the entity is created and the correspondent attached to it. You can always replace the proposal with an existing entity or correspondent instead, which is worth doing if you suspect it is already registered under a slightly different name. On the IP Cases tab, a right that is not in your portfolio is marked 'not found in portfolio' in red and gets a Create tick at the start of its row, unticked by default. Tick it and, when you save, the case is opened in your portfolio for that right, with the sender as client and the document's reference as our reference; a message tells you how many cases were created, and you complete their details in Portfolio Management afterwards. You can also search for a case by number or title and pick the right one, or delete a line that is not relevant. If the document mentions IP cases and you have not opened the IP Cases tab, Confirm refuses and shows 'Look at the IP cases first', so nobody files a document against cases they never checked.

When you click the Document Workflow button, the drawer opens on your list of documents, organised in tabs that work like boxes. Received holds what is waiting on you: documents you registered on arrival and anything a colleague has forwarded to you. Generated/Sent holds the outgoing documents you produced or sent and have not passed on, such as letters and emails generated with OIL. Information holds documents you were copied on, so you are being told rather than asked to act. Archived holds matters that have been closed, so they no longer clutter the working boxes but remain easy to find. The list shows columns such as Nature, Date, Entity, Subject, Due By and Status (In progress or Archived), with a search box to filter it, and each user can choose which columns are shown. A document appears in somebody's box according to where it currently is: once you forward it, it leaves your Received box and appears in your colleague's. Nothing is lost along the way: Show history displays the whole trail, when it was registered, who handed it on to whom, who was copied, who has it now, when it was archived and how long each step took, so the question of who had a document and when can always be answered.

You decide in the Process step of the Document Workflow form, which comes after you confirm the reading, using a set of switches. Close matter ends the document's journey, optionally with a comment, and moves it to the Archived box. Forward matter to hands it to a colleague: choose who in To, add a comment explaining what you expect, and optionally copy other colleagues in CC; Close matter and Forward matter to exclude each other, so choosing one clears the other. A colleague you copy sees the document in their Information box, informed rather than asked to act. Reminder can be added on its own or with either choice: give a quantity and a unit, from minutes to years, or pick a date and time instead. Generate reply drafts an answer for you to use. Press Proceed to apply your choice. If you opened a document from your Information box you hold only a copy, so you may close it or forward it, but only the Comment and CC fields are available, as there is nobody to hand it to. Every move is recorded: Show history on the document lists each hand-off and copy, who has it now and how long each step took. The Process step usually arrives pre-filled from your habits with that kind of document, and you can always change it.

Because it learns from what you have done before. Every time a document is dealt with, the system records the choices made in the Process step, such as whether it was closed or forwarded, to whom, who was copied and what reminder was set, against the document's classification and the person who dealt with it. When the next document of the same class reaches you, the Process step is pre-filled from that record using two rules: if your three most recent documents of that class were all handled the same way, that choice is offered, because three in a row is a decision and a habit that is changing should be picked up at once; otherwise the most frequent choice is offered, with ties going to the more recent. This means that if you start forwarding renewal notices to a new colleague, the suggestion follows you on the third document, not the thirtieth. When you have never dealt with that class yourself, the system falls back to what your practice as a whole usually does with it. The habits are kept per system, account and user, so they reflect your own way of working. A suggestion is only a starting point: nothing is done until you press Proceed, and you can change any choice beforehand.

Yes. In the Process step of the Document Workflow form, switch on Generate reply and the system drafts an answer to the document you received, using your account's own AI model. Two options shape the draft: Tone, Friendly or Formal, and Length, Short or Extensive. The reply is written in the language the document arrived in, addressed to the sender and referring to the matter, and appears in the Draft reply box on screen. It is drawn once, when you switch the option on; changing the tone or the length does not redraw it automatically, because each draft is a call to the model and is metered, so press Draw again when you want a new version. The draft is a suggestion for you to read, adapt and use: it is never saved with the document and never sent by the system. Copy it into your email or letter before you close the drawer, otherwise it is lost. If the document has no summary, abstract or subject to answer, no reply can be drafted and a message says so. When you want a formal letter produced from a template, addressed, sent and filed against the case, use Generate document (OIL) on the IP case instead. The feature depends on your account having an AI provider key and model set in Profile > API Keys & Models.

You can drop emails, PDFs, scanned letters, images and office documents onto the Document Workflow button, and all of them are read and registered. What differs is the on-screen preview. Emails saved from your mail program are opened inside your browser, with From, To, Sent and Subject laid out, the message body displayed and any attachments offered as downloads. PDFs and images in JPG, PNG or GIF format, and plain text files such as TXT, CSV or XML, are shown by your browser's own viewer from a copy held on your computer during the session. Word and Excel files are read, summarised and filed in the same way as any other document, but are not previewed: the preview shows 'Preview not available for this file format'. This is deliberate. Darwin Ignite does not use any third-party viewing service, so your documents are never sent to an outside company merely to be displayed; the only places a document goes are your account's own storage and, for the reading, the AI provider your account has chosen, on your account's own key. Use Show the document and Hide the document to open or close the preview beside the form. If an entry has no file, or its file is no longer where it was filed, a 'No document to show' message explains it.

Every document you register through the Document Workflow drawer receives an Internal Number from a running sequence that belongs to your account, so your register is numbered continuously whoever registers the document. The number is only taken when the document is actually registered: the form shows the number the document would receive, but if a colleague registers another document first, that number goes to theirs and yours takes the next, and a document that is read and then abandoned leaves no gap. When the document is filed, its file is renamed to carry the document's number, for example Contract.11044.pdf, so a file found in a folder can always be traced back to its entry; if the same letter is registered twice, the file is kept once and both entries refer to it. Files are stored in your account's own document storage, organised by account and date, and are never handed to a third-party service. The register entry keeps the classification, summary, sender, deadlines and the links to the IP cases, entities and correspondents concerned, so the document is found from those records as well as from the drawer. Documents produced by OIL are registered in the same register, so incoming and outgoing post sit together. Storage limits depend on your plan.

OIL, the Office Integration Layer, is the part of Darwin Ignite that turns an IP case into a finished, sent and filed letter from a single dialog. Every practice writes the same kinds of letter again and again, renewal reminders, office action reports, filing confirmations, and most of the effort goes on assembling them: copying the mark, numbers, deadlines and client details into a template, saving the file with a sensible name, converting it to PDF, writing the email, finding the right addresses and filing a copy against the case. OIL does that whole sequence for you. From the Generate document button on an IP case you choose the recipient, say in plain words what the letter is for, pick from the templates that best fit that case in the recipient's language, choose whether to review the document first, and choose Word, PDF or Email as the output. OIL fills in the case data, including dates written out and calculated, classes and images, gives the document your practice's reference, sends it from your own email account when you choose Email, and registers it in your document register against the case, client and contact with a summary. Documents are assembled, converted and edited on your firm's own infrastructure, and existing Darwin 5.1 templates can be converted automatically.

Open the IP case and press Generate document in its toolbar. The dialog first shows who the document is for: the role and entity, with the client offered by default, and its correspondent; the email address is found for you. Under 'What is this document for?' describe the purpose in plain words, for example renewal reminder, and the matching templates open, the closest first, with a preview; you can also press Show all templates, choose New template, or select a .docx file from your computer. Then choose the Automation type, Manual to review the document before it is completed or Automatic to run it to the end, and the Output: Word, PDF or Email, optionally with Attach the PDF. For email, Recipients lets you set From, To, Cc and Bcc. Press Confirm. The first time your account produces a document for a kind of record, you are asked to define its document reference once. A progress window shows each stage: collecting information, generating the Word document, the PDF and the email, and finishing. The final message, 'Document generated and registered' or 'Email generated, registered and sent', tells you where the document was filed and shows the session number; if something goes wrong, Report to Support sends the details for you.

OIL offers the templates that suit the case in front of you, the closest match first. Two conditions are mandatory: the template must be for the kind of record you are working on, and it must be in the recipient's language, taken from the correspondent you are writing to or, failing that, from the entity. This means a Portuguese client gets the Portuguese version of a letter and a German client the German one, without anybody having to remember which to choose, so it is worth keeping the language of your contacts up to date in Entity Management. The remaining templates are then ranked by how many of their characteristics match the case: the modality, the official status, the internal status, the jurisdiction, the stage of the life cycle and the role of the entity. The purpose you type under 'What is this document for?' is compared with each template's summary to narrow the list further. The list shows each template's name, summary and a preview you can click to enlarge, so you can see what you are choosing. If nothing matches, the message 'No template matches this document' appears: press Show all templates to drop the filters and see every template with its language and file name, or add a new template. A logical template can have one version per language.

The Automation type decides how involved you want to be before the OIL session is completed. In Manual mode the document is generated in Word and opened for you in the Edit document window, where you can read it and change the wording; your changes are saved as you make them, and when you press Done the rest of the process continues with your version, converting it to PDF, sending the email and registering it as you chose. In Automatic mode the whole session runs from start to finish without you: the document is generated, converted, sent where applicable and registered, and you see the progress and the final message. Choose Manual when the letter needs judgement or personal wording, when you are using a template for the first time or after it has been changed, when writing to a new or sensitive client, or whenever you want to check the merged data before anything leaves the firm. Choose Automatic for routine, well-tested letters, such as standard reminders or confirmations, where the template and the case data can be trusted and speed matters. Either way the result is filed in your document register against the case, client and contact. Manual editing relies on the in-browser editor; if it is unavailable, you can download the document, edit it and upload it back.

Yes. Choose Email as the Output in the Generate document dialog and OIL writes the email from the template, addresses it, sends it and files it, and you can tick Attach the PDF so the recipient also receives the letter as a file. Press Recipients to check the addressing. From lists the sending accounts your account has set up in Profile > Documents and email accounts and allowed for Darwin Ignite, so the message leaves from your firm's own mailbox. To, Cc and Bcc can each include the Manager, who is the internal manager of the IP case, the Client, which is the selected entity, and Others, where you add any further addresses. The client's address is found for you, from the correspondent first and the entity second; if neither has one, a warning says so and Client cannot be chosen. The email is sent during generation, from your own mail server, and its subject begins with the document reference. The final message 'Email generated, registered and sent' confirms it was handed over and filed against the case, client and contact. If no email account is configured, the message is produced but not sent; if sending fails, the document is still registered and you can report it to support quoting its reference.

Yes. When you choose Manual mode, the generated document opens in the Edit document window for real editing in your browser, not just a preview: you change the text, formatting and layout as you would in a word processor, your changes are saved as you make them, and you press Done to let the process continue. The same editor is used to review a new template before it is registered and, for Admins, to change a registered template with Edit template, which affects every letter produced from it afterwards. The editor is self-hosted, running on your firm's own infrastructure rather than as a cloud service. The document is passed directly between your firm's servers, and your browser only receives an image of the page, so closing the browser leaves no copy of the document on your computer. The link that lets the editor open the document is signed and works for one document, in one session, for one user, and expires after 8 hours. If the editor is unavailable, OIL falls back automatically to a read-only viewer with Download and Upload changed document buttons: you edit the downloaded copy on your computer and upload it back, and the window will not close until you do, so your work is not lost. Only .docx files can be uploaded back. In-browser editing depends on the editor being deployed for your account.

A template can draw on everything Darwin Ignite holds about the case and the people around it. From the case itself it can use the title or sign, the modality, the jurisdiction, application and registration numbers, official and internal status, life cycle, your own reference and the client's reference, and every date recorded. From the parties it can use the entity the letter is addressed to and its correspondent, the applicants and representatives, the user responsible for the case and the user writing the letter, and your account's own details. Dates are offered in several forms at once: the plain date, the date written out in full in the language of the letter, and the same date shifted forward or back by 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 or 36 months, so a template can state a response deadline without anybody calculating it. Classifications come both one by one and aggregated in a single list, with Nice classes also split into active and inactive, alongside Vienna and Locarno classes. The case's images are merged in and scaled to fit. The document reference built by your practice's formula is available too, and an email template can mark where the message body ends. A placeholder that the case does not supply is left as written, which is the sign that the template asks for something the case does not hold.

Yes. Templates written for Darwin 5.1 use an older placeholder format, and OIL recognises it. When you select or register such a template, OIL detects the placeholders it cannot fill and tells you how many there are, offering to convert them to the current format. More than 650 known mappings between the old and the new placeholders are built in, so most of a typical letter converts without any work on your part. Anything that cannot be converted with confidence is not guessed and not silently dropped: it is left in place and marked in red and bold in the document, so a person can decide what it should become, and you review the result in the editor before the template is registered. You can also choose to leave the old placeholders as they are. OIL can go further with an ordinary letter that has no placeholders at all: with the option 'Try to identify the text that corresponds to tokens used by this system', it reads the text and proposes where merge fields should go, turning names, numbers and dates into placeholders for you to confirm. These conversions use your account's own AI model and keys and are metered like any other AI use. This makes moving from Darwin 5.1 to Darwin Ignite much quicker, since years of templates can come across rather than be rewritten.

In the Generate document dialog, choose New template and select a .docx file from your computer; only Word .docx files are accepted. If a template with that name is already registered, OIL says so and uses the registered one. Otherwise the system reads the document with your account's AI model: it proposes a name and a summary, detects the language and drafts an email subject. The Confirm the template window shows the name and summary in your own interface language so you can correct the wording; the summary matters, because it is matched against the purpose people type when choosing a template. Two options are offered: converting placeholders from the previous Darwin version, when any are found, and trying to identify the text that should become merge fields, so the details of the letter it was written for, such as names, numbers and dates, turn into placeholders. Press Proceed and the result opens in the editor for you to check; Confirm and register saves it, while Cancel without registering abandons it and removes the copy, so no unused template is left behind. Once registered, its name and summary are translated into the six interface languages and a preview is generated. Any user who generates documents can add a template, while changing a registered one with Edit template is reserved for Admins.

Not yet. Digital signing of PDFs produced by OIL is not available at present. You may see the option 'Sign the PDF digitally' in the Generate document dialog when the output is PDF, or Email with the PDF attached, but it is deliberately disabled because the feature has not been released, so ticking it is not possible and no OIL document is signed. If you need to send a signed letter today, produce the PDF with OIL and sign it with your firm's usual signing tool before sending it yourself, or attach it to an email sent in the normal way. Digital Signatures bought in Profile > Billing, or included in your plan each month, are currently used for other certifications in the suite, in particular reports requested with the Digitally Certified option, which are signed to prove their content and date. Signatures never expire, so any you hold now remain available for future uses. Watch the Help Centre for news of when digital signing in OIL becomes available.

The Dashboard has four tabs. Overview, subtitled How your practice is performing, and how it compares, holds the performance indicators Efficiency, Vitality and Rentability, each for the last 30 days or the last 3, 6 or 12 months and set against comparable practices; the portfolio stratification radars, which show the shape of your client base by applicants or by clients beside the average of comparable practices; and the map Where you work, with a table of your cases by jurisdiction. Operations, What is waiting, and what falls due next, has the Watches, Publications, Deadlines and Documents cards, the forward-looking What falls due section and a Personal switch that narrows the figures to your own work. Artificial intelligence, What this account spent on models, and on what, charts daily consumption by supplier and tier and consumption by feature. Team, Who works on this account, shows everybody registered on the account, with email and call buttons and a card to invite a colleague. The figures are prepared in advance, overnight and, for the operational cards, hourly, so the screen opens at once, and no AI is used to produce them. Every heading has a question mark explaining its figure. How much of the dashboard you have depends on your plan: Free includes a simple dashboard and the higher plans an advanced one.

Efficiency answers a question your own records cannot: of everything your applicants own, how much does your practice handle? The figure has two parts, shown beneath it. Managed is your own: the IP cases in your portfolio whose applicant the national register recognises. Owned by your applicants is every application those same applicants hold in the same jurisdiction, whoever filed it, read overnight from the public industrial property registers and matched to your applicants by name once accents, punctuation and spacing are set aside. A low figure is not a criticism. It means the clients you act for also instruct other firms, which is normal for a large applicant and, for a small one, may be worth a telephone call and a conversation about new business. What matters most is the direction the figure moves in, and it should always be read against its two parts: four per cent means one thing at forty cases out of a thousand and quite another at four out of a hundred. Applicants the register does not recognise, such as a name spelt differently or a holding company filing through a subsidiary, are left out of both halves rather than counted as clients who own nothing. Register coverage varies by jurisdiction, so the figure covers more of your portfolio in some countries than in others. Efficiency is the only indicator with a true history.

Vitality says whether your portfolio is growing or going quiet. Every time a case changes to a status marked as active it counts as a movement inwards, shown as Became active, and every change to an inactive status counts as a movement outwards, Became inactive; both the official status given by the office and the internal status your practice keeps are counted. The figure is the inward share of all movement: around fifty means a portfolio in balance, above fifty one that is growing, below fifty one that is being wound down. Movements are counted rather than cases, and a quiet period with few movements can swing the figure a long way, so widen the period before drawing conclusions. Rentability separates the money you earn from the money that only passes through you. Official fees, translations and foreign associates' charges are disbursements; your own work is the fee. The figure is your fees as a share of everything billed, with Fees, Disbursements and the number of Billable acts shown beneath it. Only acts marked as chargeable are counted, from both the IP case and the court case histories, and each act is dated by the day it was performed, not the day it was invoiced. Both indicators offer the last 30 days or 3, 6 or 12 months, and each is set against comparable practices where a comparison exists.

Your practice is compared with practices like it: other offices with the same home jurisdiction and a portfolio in the same size band. Home jurisdiction means the jurisdiction where your practice actually files most of its cases, not the country on its registration, because that is where a comparison means something; comparing a two-hundred-case practice with a twenty-thousand-case one would tell the smaller one nothing it could act on. The comparison is an average and nothing else. It is computed inside the database, taken per practice and then across practices so that one large firm does not become the group, and only the average reaches your screen, marked Averaged over comparable practices. The number of practices in the group is never shown and is not even sent to your browser, because in a small jurisdiction a count is a step towards a name. No other practice can see your figures, and your cases, clients, fees and documents stay in your own account. The external half of the Efficiency figure comes from the public industrial property registers, which the offices publish by design. If there is no genuine peer group, for instance because yours is the only practice of its size in its jurisdiction, no comparison is shown rather than an invented one, and the stratification radar repeats your own figures and says why.

Operations, subtitled What is waiting, and what falls due next, is the day-to-day view. Watches shows how many watch bulletins in the period nobody has worked through yet, and how many proposals were sent to clients from them. Publications shows the publication bulletins still waiting to be analysed and the entries concerning your portfolio found in them. Both are dated by the bulletin's publication date. Deadlines shows the acts that fell due in the period and are still not executed, and the acts executed in it, across IP cases and court cases. Documents shows the documents still in somebody's hands and those passed on. What falls due is the only forward-looking part: for the next 30 days or 3, 6 or 12 months it shows, month by month, the dates on which rights must be kept alive, split into signs of commerce and inventions and into renewals, annuities, quinquennial payments and others. The Personal switch narrows the cards to the work you are answerable for: for deadlines, the cases on which you are named as responsible; for watches and publications, the jurisdictions you are responsible for in their configuration; for documents, your own tray. Personal figures deliberately do not add up to the practice total, because work nobody is named on only appears with the switch off, and that gap is how you find unassigned work.

The Artificial intelligence tab, subtitled What this account spent on models, and on what, reports on the AI your account has used; it does not itself use AI. Daily token consumption shows what the account spent at one supplier's models, day by day; a picker chooses the supplier, and each bar is split into the tiers the suite uses: main for the heaviest work, mid for the middle and low for small jobs such as naming or classifying. A segment marked tier not recorded covers calls made before the tier was being recorded, and input and output tokens are added together. Consumption by feature shows the same spending grouped by what the model was doing, across every supplier and tier, with the features named in your language and the costliest first; this is the chart to use when deciding whether a feature earns its keep. The periods are the last 7, 30 or 365 days, and hovering over a segment gives its exact figure. The figures cover the whole account, not just you, and this application rather than the whole suite. Figures for Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI are estimates based on what the model reported back; for real metered consumption and billing, the provider's own console is the authority. Figures are prepared overnight, so today's use appears tomorrow.

Because the dashboard does not calculate anything when you open it. A screen carrying this much analysis, including counts read from the public registers of several countries and averages over comparable practices, would take minutes to open if it were worked out live. Instead the heavy work is done in advance: the performance indicators, the stratification radars, the map and the AI consumption are prepared overnight, and the operational cards are refreshed hourly. The dashboard then simply reads what was prepared, which is why it opens at once and does not slow the system down for anyone else. In practice, a change you make to a case today shows in the indicators after the next overnight run, a bulletin you finish working through leaves the Watches or Publications card within the hour, and today's AI consumption appears tomorrow; the operational cards show when they were counted. History also differs between figures: only Efficiency has a true history and can be worked out as at a past date, while the portfolio radars and the world map are snapshots retaken each night and cannot be reconstructed for an earlier date. If a figure still looks wrong a day after a change, open its question mark to check what it counts and how it is dated, and if that does not explain it, contact support from the Help Centre.

Each heading and card on the dashboard has a question mark labelled What is this?. Choosing it opens a plain-language explanation of that figure, which you dismiss with Close. The explanations are written for the people who read the figures rather than for technicians, and they are deliberately candid. They say exactly what is counted and how it is dated, for example that watch bulletins are dated by the day the office published them and not by the day somebody opened them; what the figure does not mean, for example that a low Efficiency is not a criticism; how to read it against the parts shown beneath it; why the Personal figures do not add up to the practice total; and where the limits are, such as applicants the registers do not recognise or AI figures that are estimates. Several include a short worked example with dates, so you can check a figure against your own expectations. The texts are split into short paragraphs and are available in all six interface languages, English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian, appearing in the language chosen in your profile. When a figure surprises you, opening its question mark is the quickest first step before raising it with a colleague or with support, and in a meeting it is a reliable way to explain what a number does and does not say.

Go to the report list in the side menu (Documents/report list) and request a new report. Give it a Report Title, choose the Report Language and the File type, PDF or Excel, and, depending on the kind of report, set the date range with a Start Date and End Date and the Nice classes or Vienna classes to include; you can also leave a comment on your report. Tick Private if the report should be visible only to you rather than to the rest of your account, and Digitally Certified if it should be signed with a digital signature, which uses one of your Digital Signatures. Press Submit. Reports are produced in the background, so you do not have to wait on the screen: the request appears in the list with its name, requester, comment and status, and you can carry on working and come back when it shows Processed. The report language need not be your interface language, which is useful when preparing a report for a client abroad. Admins can brand the reports your account produces, with header, footer and side images and text, in Profile > Reports. The reports available, and the data they draw on, depend on your plan and on the cases in your portfolio.

Each request in the report list shows its Status, and the status tells you where it has got to. Registered means the request has been received and is waiting its turn to be produced. Processing means the report is being prepared now; large portfolios or long date ranges take longer. Processed means the report is ready and can be opened or downloaded, and the Processed Date shows when it was completed. Read means the report has been opened, which helps you see at a glance which reports are new. Error means the report could not be produced. If you see Error, first check the options you chose, such as a date range in which the start date comes after the end date, missing classes, or a range that contains no data, and request the report again. If it fails a second time, contact support from the Help Centre with the report title, the time of the request and the options you used, so the cause can be found quickly. Because reports are produced in the background, you can request several at once and continue working while they are prepared.

A digitally certified report is a report signed with a digital signature when it is produced, so that anybody receiving it can verify that its content has not been altered since and that it was issued at that date. This is useful when a report may be relied on by others, for example a portfolio status sent to a client, an auditor or a counterparty, or a record you may need to produce later as evidence of what your portfolio looked like at a given moment. To request one, tick Digitally Certified when you request the report. Each certified report uses one Digital Signature from your account: Core, Prime and Corporate plans include a monthly allowance (200, 2,000 and 5,000 respectively), and further signatures can be bought by an Admin in Profile > Billing; purchased signatures never expire. You can combine certification with the Private option, so the certified report is visible only to you. If your account has no signatures left, request the report without certification or ask an Admin to buy more.

Scrum Boards are simple ScrumBan boards for organising your team's work, from a filing campaign or a portfolio migration to internal projects. My Boards shows the boards you created and Other Boards the ones you were added to. Each board has a title, description, labels and team members, chosen individually or as the full team, and can be marked Private. A board is made of lists, typically stages such as To do, Doing and Done, and each list holds activities that you move from list to list as work progresses. An activity has a title and description, an assigned user, a due date, a priority of Low, Normal or High, the effort and cost in hours, labels, a checklist of tasks and attached files, so everything about a piece of work stays in one place. You can filter a board by label to focus on one kind of work. Board membership controls access: if you remove yourself from a board's team, you are warned that you will lose access to it. Scrum Boards are for organising internal work; deadlines of IP cases are kept on the cases themselves and in What falls due on the Dashboard. The menu entry is available where your plan and permissions include it.

In Profile > API Keys & Models. Under Model provider keys you enter your account's keys for the providers you want to use, Darwin's own, Anthropic, OpenAI or Google Gemini, and press Save. A key is encrypted when it is stored and never shown again: you can replace the stored key or remove it, but nobody can read it back. Under Models you choose which model the account uses for each kind of work, Conversations, which is the model the assistant answers with, Review, which fills a tabular review, and Naming, which names a conversation, and only models you hold a key for are listed. The keys belong to your account and are used for every AI feature in Darwin Ignite, such as reading incoming documents and drafting replies in the Document Workflow drawer, naming, summarising, translating and converting OIL templates, and the ARIA assistant. They are shared across the Darwin Suite systems your account uses, so you set them once. Your data goes to the provider you chose, on your own account, never to a shared pool, and every call is metered; the Artificial intelligence tab of the Dashboard shows the spend, although your provider's console remains the authority for billing. Managing keys is normally a task for an Admin.

The quick chat is the panel you open from the header, and it gathers three kinds of conversation in one place. Team Chat lets you exchange messages with the colleagues on your account without leaving Darwin Ignite; select a conversation to read or continue it. System Notifications collects the messages the system sends you, so you do not miss an event that concerns you. ARIA is Darwin Ignite's AI assistant: you write to it in plain language and it answers, which is useful for help with the product and with your day-to-day work. You can start a new chat session at any time, and when a long conversation approaches the limit of what the model can hold, a 'Context nearly full' warning suggests starting a new session. ARIA uses the model chosen for Conversations in Profile > API Keys & Models and your account's own API keys, so its use is metered like any other AI feature and appears on the Artificial intelligence tab of the Dashboard. As with every AI feature, check what it tells you before relying on it in client work. ARIA's availability depends on your plan and on your account having an AI provider key configured.

Darwin Lightbox is the Darwin Suite's IPCAS, a consultation and annotation system that supports the interaction and sharing of information between IP portfolio owners and their service providers. For a practice using Darwin Ignite, it is the window through which your clients can see their portfolio without asking you for status reports: a lighter web interface in which they consult their cases, with general data, annotations, evolution, documents and the life cycle graph, as well as related entities, court cases and reports, and follow their portfolio's performance on a Performance Dashboard. Lightbox users do not change case data; they read it and add annotations, such as instructions, decisions or questions, so that the conversation about a case stays with the case rather than in scattered emails. You remain in control: you keep working in Ignite, or in Darwin 5.1 depending on your configuration, and Lightbox receives a copy of the cases you decide to share. Lightbox runs on the same platform as Ignite, with the same sign-on, profile, team, roles and security, but its own branding and address. It can also be subscribed by portfolio owners who work with several service providers.

Darwin Ignite is the master record and Darwin Lightbox is the shared window onto it. You keep managing cases in Ignite: you edit them, record acts, receive and generate documents, and monitor bulletins. For each client you want to serve through Lightbox, you open the client's entity in Entity Management and add a Lightbox sync on its Lightbox tab, choosing the role the entity has on cases, such as applicant, and the client's Lightbox account. The cases in which the entity has that role are then synchronised to that account, where your client's users consult them. What reaches Lightbox is a copy: clients never work in your Ignite database, and changes to case data are made by you in Ignite and arrive at the next synchronisation. Annotations are the bridge between the two: your client can record instructions, decisions and questions on a case, and annotations you do not mark Private can be shared with the client, while Private ones stay within your own account. Both systems run on the same platform, so they share the same single sign-on, profile, roles, security and Help Centre, and a user who belongs to both moves between them with the Systems switcher. Each system has its own subscription.

There are three steps. First, the client needs a Lightbox account. One can be created from the user menu with New account, giving it a name and, if you wish, ticking Import current account configurations; it is then selected from the Accounts menu. Clients who already have a Lightbox account can simply tell you its name. Second, in Darwin Ignite open the client's entity in Entity Management, go to its Lightbox tab and add a Lightbox sync: tick Active, choose the Role the entity has on its cases, typically applicant, select the client's Lightbox Account and add any Comments. From then on the cases in which the entity has that role are synchronised to that account. Third, invite the client's contacts to the Lightbox account from Profile > Team, choosing the role each should have; they receive an invitation email, and a person who already uses any Darwin Suite system signs in with the same email and password. Apart from the initial load of the portfolio, whose duration depends on its size, setting this up takes a few minutes. Your Lightbox plan determines how many client accounts you can serve, and a sync usually requires an Admin or Contributor role in Ignite.

Open the entity in Entity Management in Darwin Ignite and go to its Lightbox tab, which lists the entity's Lightbox syncs with their number, acronym, process, name, Active flag, Role, Lightbox Account and Comments. Add a sync and fill in four fields. Active switches the sync on; while it is ticked, the entity's cases keep being synchronised. Role is the role the entity plays on the cases to be shared, for example applicant or holder; only cases in which the entity has that role are sent. Lightbox Account is the client's Lightbox account that receives them. Comments is a free note for your colleagues, such as who asked for the sync and when. An entity can have several rows, for instance one for the cases where it is applicant and another where it has a different role, or one for each of two Lightbox accounts belonging to different parts of the client's organisation. To stop sharing, untick Active, so no further updates are sent, or delete the row; Delete all removes every sync of the entity after confirmation. Check the role carefully: a sync on the wrong role shares the wrong cases, or none. Changing syncs normally requires an Admin or Contributor role.

Your client's users consult the cases you synchronise to their Lightbox account, opening each on its General tab with dates, parties, classes and status, and on Annotations, Evolution and Documents, with the life cycle graph, a link to the official register of the office and Previous and Next buttons to move through their results. They can search and filter their portfolio, consult the related entities and contacts and, depending on your configuration, court cases, all read-only: there is no Edit, Delete or Save on case or entity data, so the record remains yours. What they can do is add annotations to cases, optionally marked Private to keep them within their own organisation, which makes Lightbox the place to record instructions, decisions and questions for you. They can request and consult reports, follow their portfolio on the Performance Dashboard with its Coverage, Vitality and Conflictuality cards, Portfolio Stratification radar and World Coverage map, and manage their own profile and team, inviting colleagues with the Admin, Contributor or Reader role. Their access depends on their role in their account. Anything that needs a change to a case, a filing or a letter is done by you in Ignite and reaches them at the next synchronisation.

No. A Lightbox user never has access to your Darwin Ignite database. What Lightbox shows is a copy of the cases you have chosen to synchronise to that client's Lightbox account, sent only for the entity and role configured on the entity's Lightbox tab, and nothing else from your portfolio, other clients or internal records reaches it. Each Lightbox account receives only what is synchronised to it, so one client never sees another client's cases. The data your client sees is read-only: they cannot edit, delete or create case or entity data, and any change is made by you in Ignite and arrives at the next synchronisation. Annotations you mark Private stay within your own account and are not shared with the client. All traffic is encrypted over HTTPS, the account a user can see is taken from their authenticated session rather than from the address bar, and access within the client's account follows the roles its administrators assign. To stop sharing, untick Active on the sync or delete it, and ask the client's administrators to remove users who should no longer have access.

Darwin Lightbox has two plans, distinguished by who subscribes. The Law Firm plan is for service providers, such as law firms and IP agencies, that want to serve their base of portfolio owner clients: it covers 25 accounts for IP portfolio owners, with annotation capabilities, so a practice using Darwin Ignite can give each client its own Lightbox account. The Brand Owner plan is for portfolio owners, such as companies and in-house IP teams, that want to bring their service providers together: it covers 5 accounts for IP service providers, either with annotation only, or with annotation plus integration with Darwin 5.1 or Darwin Ignite, so the owner can see in one place the cases managed by each of its providers. Both plans offer unlimited cases and unlimited documents per account, and advanced AI-powered analytics for the subscriber. The limit is on the number of accounts, not on the size of the portfolios. A Lightbox subscription is separate from your Ignite subscription and is managed by an Admin in Profile > Subscriptions, with monthly or yearly payment. Credit balances are not shown in Lightbox. For prices, see Subscriptions or contact the sales team.

Yes. Darwin Lightbox and Darwin Ignite share Techframe's federated single sign-on, so the same email and password give you access to both, and to every other Darwin Suite system. Once signed in, use the Systems switcher in the user menu to move between Ignite and Lightbox without signing in again, and the Accounts switcher to choose the account you are working in, for example your own practice's account in Ignite and a client's Lightbox account to see what that client sees. The data you see is always that of the account selected. Your profile, language, password and two-step sign-in apply to both systems. Each system has its own subscription: if you open a system for which your account has no subscription, you are enrolled as Reader and the account's administrators are informed. Your role can differ from one account to another, so you may be an Admin in your practice's account and a Reader in a client's. The same applies to your clients' users: if they already use another Darwin Suite system, they accept their Lightbox invitation by signing in with their existing email and password rather than creating a new one.

Your clients open Lightbox at its own address, with Darwin Lightbox's own branding on the sign-in and welcome pages, so it is clearly a consultation system rather than your full operational system. Inside, the interface has the same style and layout as Darwin Ignite, with a side menu, header tools and user menu, but a lighter set of screens: the Performance Dashboard, which monitors their activity and the performance of their portfolio, their cases and entities, reports and the Help Centre. The company logo set for their account in Company Account appears in the interface. Each user sees Lightbox in the language chosen in their own profile, from English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian, while the case data appears as you recorded it. The menu depends on the configuration and on the permissions of each user. Lightbox does not offer per-client custom branding beyond the account's own logo. The first time they sign in, after accepting your invitation, they land on the Performance Dashboard, and the Help Centre offers FAQs and short tutorials on getting started, consulting the portfolio and using annotations, which you may want to point them to when you send the invitation.

Work through the chain from your entity to the client's screen. First, on the Lightbox tab of the client's entity in Entity Management, check that there is a sync row and that it is ticked Active; an inactive or deleted row sends nothing. Second, check the Role: only cases in which the entity has the role chosen on the sync are shared, so open the missing case in Ignite and confirm that the entity is recorded on it in that role, for example as applicant, rather than in another role or under a duplicate entity. Third, check that the sync points to the right Lightbox Account, the one the client's user is actually looking at. Fourth, if the sync or the case is recent, the initial load may not have finished; its duration depends on the size of the portfolio, and changes arrive at the next synchronisation. Fifth, on the client's side, check that the user belongs to that Lightbox account, has accepted the invitation and has the right account selected in the Accounts switcher, and that no filter on their search is hiding the case. If everything is in order and the case still does not appear, open a ticket in the Help Centre with the case reference, the entity and the Lightbox account name.

Darwin Suite uses one federated single sign-on, shared by every Techframe system. You have one user identity, an email address and a password, and it gives you access to Darwin Ignite, Darwin Lightbox and the other systems of the suite. There is no separate password to create or remember for each system, and if you change or reset your password, the new one applies everywhere. When you sign in, you work within an account, and the account you have selected scopes all the data you see: one user can belong to several accounts, for example a professional working for more than one firm or a brand owner dealing with several providers. Once signed in, you move between systems with the Systems switcher and between accounts with the Accounts switcher, both in the user menu, without signing in again. Your role, Admin, Contributor or Reader, is set per account, so you may have different permissions in different accounts. If you have turned on two-step sign in, the authenticator code is requested as part of the same single sign-on, so the extra protection covers every system at once. For security, the account is always taken from your authenticated session and never from the address shown in your browser.

Protection in Darwin Suite works at several levels. All traffic between your browser and the services travels over HTTPS, encrypted with TLS; any attempt to use plain HTTP is redirected, and browsers are instructed to refuse unencrypted connections in future, a mechanism known as HSTS. Only approved application addresses are allowed to call the services, so other websites cannot use your session to reach your data. Sensitive credentials that you store, such as the passwords of the mailboxes used to send documents and the API keys of AI providers, are encrypted with AES-GCM and are never displayed again once saved. Access inside each account is role-based: Admins, Contributors and Readers each see and do only what their role allows. The account whose data you see is always taken from your authenticated session, never from the address bar, so nobody can reach another account's information by editing a URL. You can add two-step sign in with an authenticator app for extra protection of your own access. Beyond the application, Techframe's published security statement covers backups, audit trails, incident response and confidentiality agreements signed by its staff, and the suite adheres to the GDPR. Keeping your password private, enabling two-step sign in and reviewing who belongs to your team are the most useful things you can add yourself.

Yes, and it is recommended, especially if you handle client or portfolio information. Two-step sign in adds a second check to your password: after entering your email address and password, you type a short code generated by an authenticator app on your phone, so someone who learns your password still cannot get in without your device. To turn it on, open your Profile, go to Security and use the Two-step sign in option; you link your authenticator app by following the instructions on screen, and from your next sign-in the code is requested every time. Because Darwin Suite has a single sign-on, the protection covers every system you use, Darwin Ignite, Darwin Lightbox and the others, at once. The same Security panel is where you change your password. Passwords must have at least 8 characters and include a letter, a number and a special character, and for your protection a password can be changed at most twice in 24 hours. If you forget your password, the Forgot password link on the sign-in page sends you a reset email, but the two-step code is still required afterwards, so keep your authenticator app available. Two-step sign in is a personal setting, so each member of your team needs to turn it on for themselves.

Only the members of your account can see its information, and each of them only according to their role. Admins can read and modify data and manage users and configuration, Contributors can read and modify, and Readers can only read; some panels, such as Company Account, Billing and the report layout, are reserved for Admins. People join an account only by invitation or by a request that the Admins approve, and Admins can change roles or remove users from the Team panel at any time. The account you are working in is always taken from your authenticated session, never from the address in your browser, so other accounts cannot reach your data by changing a URL, and you cannot reach theirs. In Darwin Lightbox, each Lightbox account receives only the cases its service provider has synchronised to it, so one client never sees another client's portfolio, and annotations marked Private stay within the account that wrote them. Where the Darwin Ignite dashboard compares a practice with similar practices, the comparison is an average calculated inside the database: no other practice's figures are shown, the number of practices in the group is never displayed, and no comparison appears at all if there is no genuine peer group. Techframe staff are bound by confidentiality agreements under its security statement.

Darwin Suite adheres to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The data controller is Techframe – Sistemas de Informação, SA, and questions about personal data can be sent to its data protection contact at dataprotectionoffice@techframe.pt with the subject "GDPR consultation". This is the address to use if you wish to exercise your rights under the GDPR, such as access to, rectification of or erasure of your personal data. IP work inevitably involves personal data, such as the names and contact details of applicants, agents and their contacts, so the suite builds data protection into the steps where it matters. When a portfolio is loaded into Darwin Ignite through the Upload portfolio wizards, you are asked for a GDPR approval before the processes are loaded, confirming that you are entitled to process the personal data they contain. Access to information is limited to the members of each account according to their roles, and the account is always taken from the authenticated session. Stored credentials are encrypted, traffic is encrypted in transit, and Techframe's published security statement covers backups, audit trails, incident response and staff confidentiality agreements. When AI features are used, they run with your account's own chosen provider and keys, so you decide which provider processes that content.

Artificial intelligence in Darwin Suite helps with tasks such as reading incoming documents and proposing their classification, sender, summary, deadlines and related cases, drafting replies, describing and translating new letter templates, the trade mark and logo searching of Darwin GSE and the document analysis of Darwin Axiom. Every AI feature uses your account's own choice of provider and model and your account's own API keys, which an Admin sets in Profile under API Keys & Models. You can choose between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini or Darwin's own service, and pick the model per use. Content is sent only to the provider you have chosen, under your own key; nothing goes into a shared pool. The keys are encrypted when saved and never displayed again. Every call is metered and recorded, and in Darwin Ignite the Artificial intelligence tab of the Dashboard shows the spend by day, by supplier, by tier and by feature; for Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI these figures are estimates, and the provider's own console remains the authority for billing. The AI proposes and a person confirms: nothing it suggests is registered or sent until a user has reviewed it, and drafted replies are never saved or sent automatically. Dashboards themselves do not use AI; their figures are calculated directly from your data.

Darwin Ignite is the web-based IP management system of Darwin Suite, built for the people who run portfolios on behalf of others: IP agents, attorneys, law firms and IP agencies. It is where your practice keeps its trade marks, patents, designs and other rights, together with the entities behind them (clients, applicants, representatives and correspondents) and your litigation in Court Case. Around that record it covers the daily work of a practice: the Watch Section and the Publication List follow official bulletins for conflicts and for incidences affecting your cases, Viabilities handles registrability requests, the document workflow drawer registers incoming emails, PDFs and scanned letters with the help of AI, and OIL (Office Integration Layer) produces letters and emails straight from a case. Deadlines are worked out from each case's dates and pending acts and are coloured as they approach, reports can be requested in PDF or Excel, Scrum Boards organise team tasks, and the Dashboard shows how the practice is performing and how it compares with similar practices. Ignite runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install, and it shares one sign-on, one team and one account with the other Darwin Suite systems; it is also the source that feeds your clients' Darwin Lightbox accounts. Which menu entries you see depends on your role and on your plan.

On the sign-in page choose Sign up, which opens Create your free account. Enter your Email address, then a Password and the same password again in Password (Confirm). The password must have at least 8 characters and include at least one letter, one number and one special character; the form tells you straight away if it is not strong enough or if the two do not match. Use an address you can receive mail at, because the next step depends on it: Ignite shows Confirmation required and sends you an email with instructions, and you must follow the link in it to confirm your address and activate your account. If nothing arrives within a few minutes, look in your spam or junk folder and check that the address was typed correctly. If the screen says that an account with this email may already exist, you probably already have a Darwin Suite sign-in, for example from Darwin Lightbox, Darwin GSE or Darwin Axiom: because the suite uses a single sign-on, you simply sign in with that same email and password instead of registering again. Once your address is confirmed you complete a short setup page with your own details and those of your account, and the account starts on the Free plan, which you can upgrade later from Subscriptions.

After you confirm your email address, Ignite opens a short setup page in steps, with Next and Back to move between them. In the Personal step you give your First Name and Last Name, your Language and your Country. The language matters more than it looks: it sets the language of the whole interface (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German or Italian) and the language in which AI summaries of incoming documents are written for you, whatever language the document itself is in. In the Company step you describe the account your work will belong to: its name, Type, Dimension, Activity, Country and Tax ID. The name identifies the account to your colleagues; the type, dimension and activity describe the organisation, and the country records where it is established. If the account name you type already exists, Ignite tells you so and sends your registration request to that account's administrators for approval, so you join the existing account rather than creating a duplicate. In the Legal step you read the terms through View Terms and Conditions (PDF) and tick I accept the terms and conditions, without which you cannot finish. When you choose Finish, Ignite confirms Profile Completed and takes you to the sign-in page. Everything you entered can be changed later in Profile, under Personal Account and, for administrators, Company Account.

The simplest way is to ask one of your company's administrators to invite you. An Admin opens Profile > Team, enters your email address, chooses your role and sends the invitation, and you receive an email with a link. Following it you either accept, and see Invitation Accepted with the name of the account you have joined, or decline, and see Invitation Declined. Invitation links do not last for ever: if the page says Invitation Expired, the link is no longer valid and you should ask for a new invitation. If you already have a Darwin Suite sign-in you use the same email and password; if not, you create your password as part of accepting. The alternative is to register yourself with Create your free account and, on the setup page, type your company's existing account name. Ignite then tells you that the account already exists and sends your request to its administrators, who see it under Pending Approvals in their Team panel and can accept or decline it. Until they act you have no access to the account's data, and when they accept you join as Reader, which lets you consult but not change anything; an Admin can then give you the Contributor or Admin role. If you belong to several accounts, you choose between them from Accounts in the user menu.

On the sign-in page choose Forgot password?, type the email address you sign in with and press Send reset link. For your protection Ignite does not say whether the address is registered: it only tells you that a reset link will be sent shortly if the address exists in the system. Open the email, follow the link to Reset your password, and enter your new password twice. It must have at least 8 characters and include at least one letter, one number and one special character. Once you see the confirmation, return to sign in with the new password. Remember that Darwin Suite uses a single sign-on, so the new password replaces the old one in every Darwin Suite system you use, not only in Ignite. If you have turned on two-step sign in, resetting the password does not switch it off: after the password you will still be asked for the six-digit code from your authenticator app. If the email does not arrive, check your spam or junk folder and make sure you used the address you registered with; reset links can expire, so request a new one rather than relying on an old email. Once you are signed in you can change your password at any time from Profile > Security, where it can be changed at most twice in 24 hours.

After signing in you land on the Dashboard, which on a new account has little to show until your portfolio is loaded and the overnight preparation of figures has run. On the left is the side menu. Its entries are set by the server according to your role and your plan, so colleagues may see different menus; typically they include Dashboard, Portfolio Management (Search Processes), Entity Management, Court Case, Watch Section, Publication List, Viabilities, Upload portfolio, the documents and reports list, Scrum Boards and Help Centre. The header on every screen carries the document workflow drawer for registering incoming documents, a global search, shortcuts, a full-screen switch and the quick chat, which holds Team Chat, System Notifications and the AI assistant ARIA. The user menu at the top right gives you Profile, Accounts, Systems, New Account, Settings, your status and Sign out. Good first steps are to complete Profile > Personal Account and choose your language, and to turn on Two-step sign in under Security. If you are an Admin, also review Company Account (date format, time format, currency, week start), invite your colleagues from Team, add the email accounts documents will be sent from, and set your AI keys in API Keys & Models. Then bring in your cases with Upload portfolio.

Both switchers are in the user menu at the top right of the screen. Accounts lists every account you belong to; choose one and everything you see from then on, including cases, entities, documents, the dashboard and the team, belongs to that account alone. One person can be a member of several accounts, for instance a firm's own account and a separate one for a group company, and can hold a different role in each. The account is taken from your signed-in session, never from the page address, so nobody can reach another account's data by editing a URL; if something you expected is missing, the first thing to check is which account is selected. Systems lists the Darwin Suite systems, such as Darwin Lightbox, Darwin GSE and Darwin Axiom. Thanks to single sign-on you move between them without signing in again, and the same account, team and profile follow you. If your account has no subscription for the system you choose, you are told that you will be enrolled as Reader and that the system's administrators will be informed, and asked to confirm; to have your status promoted you must request it. New Account, in the same menu, creates a further account, optionally with Import current account configurations, which you then select from Accounts.

Yes. Every new registration starts on the Free plan, shown in Subscriptions as Free Forever, and you can work with it for as long as it suits you. It is designed for an individual or a very small practice: one simultaneous user, up to 1,000 processes, 10,000 documents or 1 GB of storage, the free upload of 100 processes from official institutes, watching and bulletin publications in one jurisdiction with simple alerts, five editable email templates, life cycles for trade marks and patents in all jurisdictions, AI-supported classification of incoming emails and a simple dashboard. Features that use artificial intelligence run on the provider, model and keys your account sets in Profile > API Keys & Models, so their use depends on that configuration. When you need more users, processes, jurisdictions or storage, an Admin can move to Core, Prime or Corporate at any time from Profile > Subscriptions, with monthly or yearly billing. A plan change takes effect the next time you sign in, and an increase is charged for the rest of the current month. Prices are shown in Subscriptions rather than here, because they change; for larger or tailored arrangements, talk to the Techframe sales team.