Law Department Management Blog
Law departments overseeing substantial intellectual property portfolios, such as hundreds of patents or thousands of trademarks or both, often license specialized IP management systems like those from Master Data Center, Dennemeyer and CPI. Companies with that level of need for tracking patent and trademark data also tend to be large enough to decide to install an MMS to track information about its non-IP matters.
The rub comes when the department realizes it needs an integrated set of metrics from the two databases of matters, spending, and law firms used. The two kinds of systems do not play well together in the sandbox of shared data. Neither family of software, MMS or IP database, adequately meets the full set of requirements of a law department.
Some law departments manually combine the data output from the two systems; some departments code a batch process to pass data periodically from one to the other; a handful might have a portal that pulls the data together.