Maintain what matters

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.