For in-house IP managers

Darwin Lightbox is the IPCAS of Darwin Suite, a consultation and annotation system that supports the interaction and information sharing between IP portfolio owners and their service providers. It gives you a lighter web interface where you can consult, review and annotate the information about your trade marks, patents, designs and other rights, the entities linked to them and, where your provider shares them, your court cases, without having to work inside the full operational system your provider uses. The cases you see are a copy synchronised from your provider's system, which is Darwin Ignite or, depending on your provider's configuration, Darwin 5.1, so the record itself stays with the people who manage it. On top of that copy you can read each case's general data, history, documents and theoretical life cycle, follow the Performance Dashboard that monitors the activity and performance of your portfolio, request reports, and add annotations to record instructions, questions and decisions. Lightbox is developed by Techframe and runs on the same platform as the rest of Darwin Suite, so you sign in with the same email and password, manage your profile and team in the same way and find the same Help Centre.

Lightbox is designed for two sides of the same relationship. On one side are IP portfolio owners: brand owners, companies of any size and in-house IP or legal teams who need to know the state of their rights at any moment but do not run the day-to-day prosecution and maintenance themselves. On the other side are IP service providers, such as IP agents, attorneys, law firms and IP agencies, who manage those portfolios in their own system and want to give their clients a reliable window onto the work instead of answering each status request separately. Lightbox also suits people inside an organisation who need to consult the portfolio without operating it, for example marketing, product, management or finance colleagues who want to check where a mark is protected or when a right falls due for renewal. Because each user is given a role, an account can include people who only read, people who also write annotations and administrators who manage the team. There are plans for both sides: the Law Firm plan, subscribed by a service provider to serve its clients, and the Brand Owner plan, subscribed by a portfolio owner to work with its providers.

Without a shared tool, information about an IP portfolio usually travels by email: the owner asks for the status of a case, the provider looks it up and replies, spreadsheets are exchanged and periodic reports are out of date almost as soon as they are sent. Different people end up working from different versions, and the reasons behind past decisions are scattered across mailboxes. Lightbox replaces much of that exchange with one shared source of information. The cases your provider manages for you are synchronised to your Lightbox account, so you can look up a filing date, a status, the next deadline, the history of acts or a document yourself, at any time, instead of waiting for a reply. Annotations keep instructions, questions and decisions attached to the case they concern, with their author and date, so the context is not lost when people change. The Performance Dashboard and the reports give you an overview of the portfolio for reviews and meetings. The result is fewer routine requests for your provider, quicker answers for you and a common, documented basis for the conversations you still need to have.

In Lightbox you can search and consult the cases synchronised to your account, opening each one to read its general data, annotations, history in the Evolution tab and documents, view its theoretical life cycle, follow the link to the official register of the IP office and move to the previous or next case in your results. You can also consult the entities linked to your cases and, where your provider shares them, court cases. You can add annotations to a case, marking them Private when they are for your own account only, provided your role allows it. You can follow the Performance Dashboard, request and consult reports, manage your own profile and, if you are an Admin, your account's team. What you cannot do is change the underlying data: case, entity and court case records are read-only, so there is no Edit, Delete or Save, and you cannot create new cases, load portfolios, run watches or generate letters and documents. Those tasks belong to your service provider, who carries them out in their own system; the changes then reach Lightbox at the next synchronisation. If something needs correcting or doing, record it in an annotation or contact your provider.

IPCAS stands for IP Consultation and Annotation System, which is how Techframe describes Darwin Lightbox. Each part of the name describes what you do with it. IP refers to the intellectual property rights at the centre of the relationship between you and your service provider: trade marks, patents, designs and other rights, together with the parties and, where shared, the court cases around them. Consultation means that Lightbox is a place to look things up rather than to operate: you search the portfolio, open cases and entities, read their history and documents, see their life cycle and follow the dashboard and reports, but the records themselves are kept and changed by your provider. Annotation means that you are not only a reader: you can attach notes to a case to give instructions, ask questions or record decisions, each with its author and date, and you can keep some of them private to your own account. System reflects that this is a structured, shared environment with users, roles and security, not a set of files sent back and forth. Together, consultation and annotation are what support the interaction and information sharing between portfolio owners and service providers.

No. Lightbox is a companion to an IP management system, not a substitute for it. The system your service provider uses to manage your portfolio, Darwin Ignite or, depending on your provider's configuration, Darwin 5.1, remains the master record: that is where cases are created and updated, deadlines are controlled, official bulletins are monitored, incoming documents are registered and letters are produced. Lightbox receives a copy of the cases synchronised to your account and gives you web access to it, with the ability to add annotations, without asking anyone to change the way they already work. If your provider already uses one of these systems, Lightbox simply adds a window for you on top of it. If your company wants to manage its own portfolio operationally rather than consult what a provider manages, that is the role of a full IP management system such as Darwin Ignite, which can be used with the same sign-in; Lightbox would then remain the place where you share information with your providers. Either way, the operational work and the consultation layer are kept apart, which is what lets each side use the tool that suits it.

The information in Lightbox comes from your service provider's IP management system. The usual source is Darwin Ignite, Techframe's web IP management system for agents, attorneys and law firms: in Ignite, your provider opens the entity that represents you, for example your company as applicant, and on its Lightbox tab sets up a synchronisation that sends the cases where that entity has a given role to your Lightbox account. Lightbox was first offered to customers of Darwin 5.1, Techframe's established client-server IP management system, and users of Darwin 5.1 can be served through the same model, depending on your provider's configuration. In every case, what you see in Lightbox is a copy of the synchronised cases, their parties, classes, history and the documents shared with you; you never have access to the provider's own database, and you only receive the cases synchronised to your account. If you work with several providers, each of them can feed its own Lightbox account, and you can move between those accounts from the Accounts menu. Lightbox does not collect data directly from IP offices; it shows what your provider's system holds, including the link to the official register for each case.

Darwin Ignite is an operational system and Lightbox is a consultation system. Ignite is used by IP service providers, such as agents, attorneys and law firms, to run their practice: they create and edit IP cases, manage entities and court cases, control deadlines, monitor bulletins in the Watch Section and Publication List, handle viability requests, register incoming documents, generate letters with OIL, load portfolios and follow a dashboard about the performance of the practice. Lightbox is used mainly by portfolio owners, and by providers when they want to offer their clients a shared view: it shows a read-only copy of the cases synchronised to the account, lets you add annotations, request reports and follow a Performance Dashboard about the portfolio itself, with Coverage, Vitality and Conflictuality, Portfolio Stratification and World Coverage. Both systems run on the same Darwin Suite platform, so the sign-in, the profile, the team, the roles and the Help Centre work in the same way, but they have their own branding, address and subscriptions. In short, Ignite is where the work is done, and Lightbox is where the people who own the rights can see it and comment on it.