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Darwin Ignite is the web-based IP management system of Darwin Suite for service providers: IP agents, attorneys and law firms. It is where your provider may keep and work on your portfolio, and therefore, for many Lightbox users, the source of the information they consult. In Ignite a provider records and edits trade marks, patents, designs and other rights, with their dates, parties, classes, history and documents; manages clients, applicants, agents and contacts in Entity Management; follows litigation in Court Case; watches official bulletins for marks that may conflict with your portfolio in the Watch Section; tracks publications that affect your cases in the Publication List; runs viability (registrability) searches; registers incoming letters and emails with the help of AI; generates letters and documents from a case with OIL, its Office Integration Layer; follows deadlines; produces reports; and measures the practice's performance on its own dashboard. It runs on the same platform as Lightbox, by Techframe, with the same sign-on, profile, roles and security. From the entity record it keeps for your company, your provider can synchronise your cases to your Lightbox account, which is how a portfolio managed in Ignite becomes visible to you.

The two systems play complementary parts in the same relationship. Darwin Ignite is the operational system in which your provider keeps the official record of your cases and does the work: entering events, receiving and filing correspondence, following deadlines, monitoring bulletins and producing letters. Darwin Lightbox is the shared window through which you consult that record and comment on it: it receives a copy of the cases synchronised to your account, shows them read-only, and lets you add annotations, request reports and follow the Performance Dashboard. The link between them is the synchronisation your provider sets up on your company's entity record in Ignite, which sends the cases where your company has a chosen role to your Lightbox account and keeps them updated as your provider works. Annotations are the bridge in the other direction, carrying your instructions and questions where the configuration allows, while private annotations stay with whoever wrote them. Because both systems run on the same Darwin Suite platform, they share the single sign-on, the profile, the roles, the security and the Help Centre; someone who uses both moves between them with the Systems switcher in the user menu, without signing in again.

Your provider needs three things: a Lightbox account for you, a synchronisation and invitations. The Lightbox account is created from the user menu with New account, giving it a name and, optionally, importing the current account's configurations; it can be created by your company or by your provider on your behalf. In Ignite, your provider then opens your company's record in Entity Management and, on its Lightbox tab, adds a synchronisation row: Active to switch it on, Role for the role your company has on the cases to be shared, such as applicant, Lightbox Account to name your account, and Comments for their notes. Every case in which your company has that role is then copied to your account and kept up to date; several rows can be added for different roles or accounts. Finally your provider, or an Admin of your account, invites your colleagues, who receive an email and sign in with their Darwin Suite email and password. Apart from the initial load, which depends on the size of your portfolio, the set-up takes a few minutes. If your provider works in Darwin 5.1 rather than Ignite, a similar arrangement can be made, depending on their configuration.

Ignite is built for doing the work on a portfolio, Lightbox for following it. In Ignite, users with the right role can edit cases and open new ones, change dates, parties, classes and life cycles, and record acts and invoices on the Evolution tab, all of which Lightbox only shows. Ignite also includes tools Lightbox does not have: the Watch Section, which monitors official bulletins for marks that might conflict with the portfolio and supports oppositions; the Publication List of incidences published about the cases; viability searches, powered by Darwin GSE; the document workflow drawer, where incoming emails, PDFs and scanned letters are read with the help of AI, matched to cases and filed; OIL, which generates letters and documents from a case, in the recipient's language, and can send them by email; Upload portfolio, to load a portfolio from public registers or a spreadsheet; Scrum Boards for team tasks; the ARIA assistant; and a dashboard that measures the practice itself, with Efficiency, Vitality and Rentability compared with peers, operations, AI spending and team. Reports exist in both. What Lightbox offers instead is a lighter, read-only view with annotations, designed for portfolio owners and colleagues who consult rather than operate.

Ignite gives your provider one place to run every stage of your rights, and much of that work shows up in Lightbox as updates to your cases. Deadlines are calculated from each case's next valid date together with the acts still pending in its history, and are coloured as they approach, so that renewals and responses are not missed. The Watch Section monitors official bulletins for new marks similar to yours, so that your provider can propose oppositions in time, and the Publication List gathers incidences published about your cases, such as requests, grants or refusals. Incoming correspondence is registered through the document workflow drawer, where AI reads each document and proposes its type, a summary, the deadlines it mentions and the cases it concerns, all confirmed by a person before filing. Letters and reports to you are produced with OIL from the case data, in your language, and filed against the case and against your company. As your provider records these events, the case's status, history, deadlines and shared documents change in Ignite, and the synchronisation brings those changes to your Lightbox account, which is why you can follow the progress of your portfolio without asking for a status report.

Yes. Darwin Suite uses one federated single sign-on for all its systems, so the email and password you use for Lightbox are also your sign-in for Darwin Ignite and the other suite systems; there is no separate account to create or password to remember. Once you have access to Ignite, you move between the two from the Systems switcher in the user menu, without signing in again, and your profile, language and two-step sign-in apply to both. What you see in Ignite, however, depends on the account you work in and on its subscription: having a sign-in is not the same as having an Ignite account with a portfolio in it. You can be invited into an Ignite account by its Admin, for instance by your company's own IP team, or create an Ignite account of your own, starting with the Free plan. If you join Ignite through an account that has no subscription for it, you are enrolled as a Reader and the account's Admins are informed, so that they can decide what access to give you. Note that using Ignite does not give you access to your provider's Ignite account: their system and their data remain theirs, and you continue to see your cases through Lightbox.

Yes. Although Ignite is designed mainly for service providers, nothing prevents a company or an in-house IP team from creating its own Ignite account and managing its rights there. You start from Create your free account with your email and password, or, if you already use Lightbox, with your existing Darwin Suite sign-in, and set up the account, beginning with the Free plan, which allows one user and up to 1,000 processes, and moving to Core, Prime or Corporate as your needs grow. To load your portfolio, Upload portfolio offers the Portfolio Applicants wizard, which starts from your company as applicant, identifies the jurisdictions and processes found in public registers, asks you to validate them and to give GDPR approval, and then loads them in the background, as well as the option of loading a spreadsheet. Keep in mind that this is a separate portfolio, managed by you: it does not replace or edit your provider's records, and cases your provider manages continue to reach you through Lightbox. The sales team can tell you more about which option suits your company.

It is a copy of the same information for the cases that are synchronised to you, but not a complete mirror of your provider's system. Lightbox receives the cases in which your company holds the role your provider chose, with their details, parties, classes, history and the documents shared, and it is refreshed as your provider works, so at any moment it may lag slightly behind the Ignite record until the next update arrives. It also contains less than Ignite: your provider's other clients, their internal work such as watch analysis, document workflow, scrum boards and the practice dashboard, and anything not shared with you never reach your account. Annotations follow their own rules: private annotations written in Ignite stay with your provider, private annotations you write in Lightbox stay with you, and non-private ones can be shared according to how the synchronisation is configured. The figures differ as well, because each system has its own dashboard: Lightbox measures your portfolio, Ignite measures the practice. When Lightbox and what you were told by your provider disagree, the Ignite record is the reference; ask your provider to check it, and the correction will reach you at the next synchronisation.

They answer different questions for different readers. The Lightbox Performance Dashboard looks at your portfolio: its Coverage, Vitality and Conflictuality cards describe how far your rights are protected, how active the portfolio has been and how much of it is drawing oppositions or disputes, over 30 days or 3, 6 or 12 months; the Portfolio Stratification radar compares this year with last year in new and completed tasks; and the World Coverage map shows where your portfolio has rights. The Ignite dashboard looks at the service provider's practice and has four tabs: Overview, with Efficiency (the share of its clients' filings found in public registers that the practice actually handles), Vitality and Rentability, compared with practices of similar size in the same home jurisdiction, plus portfolio radars and a map of where it files; Operations, with watches, publications, deadlines, documents and what falls due, and a Personal switch for each person's own work; Artificial intelligence, with the spending of the account's AI; and Team. Vitality appears on both but measures each from its own side. Both are prepared in advance rather than calculated on opening, and neither uses AI to produce its figures. Your provider's dashboard is not visible from Lightbox.

Darwin Ignite has four plans, chosen in Subscriptions. Free is for getting started: one user, up to 1,000 processes, 10,000 documents or 1 GB, one jurisdiction with simple alerts, 5 email templates, 100 free uploads from official institutes and a simple AI dashboard. Core allows 5 users, 5,000 processes, 250,000 documents or 500 GB, three jurisdictions with detailed alerts, domain watch, 200 signatures a month, 250 uploads and the advanced dashboard. Prime allows 20 users, unlimited processes, 50 million documents or 10 TB, five jurisdictions, auto-updating files, 2,000 signatures, 1,000 uploads and a private language model for email classification. Corporate offers unlimited users and processes, a dedicated server, 20 TB, ten jurisdictions, 5,000 signatures and 5,000 uploads. Plans can be paid monthly or yearly, the yearly option saving two months; changes take effect at the next sign-in and increases are charged pro rata. Silver credits come with the plan, while Gold credits and Digital Signatures can be bought and never expire. These are Ignite subscriptions, separate from Lightbox's Law Firm and Brand Owner plans; for prices, see Subscriptions in Ignite or ask the Techframe sales team.