Adding business value

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.