As a shareholder in an IP practice, you wear multiple hats. You’re running your own practice, managing the work of other practitioners, and you’re running a business with complex operating rules and very little margin for error.

Operational issues are a time-sink for practitioners, but critically important given that the most common and nightmare-inducing errors are typically administrative in nature. Preventing these costly errors requires that systems and rules be put into place across the entire practice. It’s not good enough that you’re being careful. Any operational errors that occur anywhere in the practice affect you, so it’s your responsibility to ensure good processes are in-place and followed everywhere.

At the same time, enacting change across a legal practice can be daunting. When a practice cannot agree on holistic improvements, they often resort to “quick fixes” that pile-up over time to create bloated processes that impact profitability and create new risks of their own.

Join us on Thursday, May 9, 2024, at 12 PM ET, for a conversation about patent prosecution risk. In addition to taking questions from the audience, our panel will discuss:

• Why malpractice leads to ethical investigations.
• The duty of oversight at the practitioner level vs. the practice level.
• Nightmare scenarios that have led to ethical investigations and client catastrophe.
• What the rules of conduct require, including notifying clients when things have gone off the rails.
• Implementing systems and rules to protect the firm and clients from process-related risk.
• How operational “safety nets” become bloated to create inefficiency and risk of their own.
• Leveraging automation to move error prevention higher up in the workflow and support continuous improvement.
• Creating alignment behind change by connecting process improvement to value creation.
• Putting it all together in the real world by leveraging technology to enhance good operating structures and redundancies.