LESS BLANK-PAGE TIME AND MORE STRUCTURED INNOVATION

Running a Patent Portfolio on Design Your Invention

A patent used to be a rich company's weapon. Drafting one application alone has cost around $9,000 to $17,000 and taken four to twelve weeks. Add nine countries, nine sets of office actions, and twenty years of renewal fees, and most individual inventors, small start-ups and MSMEs quietly walk away.

Design Your Invention (DYI) https://designyourinvention.com/ does not change the law. It changes the arithmetic.

Patent work is really nine separate jobs.

The first two are capturing the invention and searching prior art. The DYI patent search is open to anyone, free, with no signup. It covers more than 120 million records across over 100 patent authorities, and you can search six ways: by keyword, inventor, applicant, IPC, CPC or patent number. Each result gives you bibliographic data, the abstract, the claims, citations and the patent family. Save the references you care about straight to a patent family and they stay with the case. The rule never changes: search first, draft second.

The third and fourth jobs are drafting and checking that draft. Pick the prior art you saved, describe your invention, and DYI produces a structured first specification in under five minutes, written to the drafting conventions of your target office. US, EP, Indian and PCT drafting are in production today, with Japan and China planned. Nothing is filed on autopilot. Every draft carries a disclaimer and needs attorney sign-off before it can be exported. You generate version one, read it, add your instructions, and regenerate version two, and each version is kept as a separate record that cannot be edited afterwards. Drafting runs on enterprise AI providers configured so your invention data is used only to produce your draft.

The fifth job is filing, and here you need honesty. No software presses submit for you at the USA, Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Canada and Israel offices. DYI prepares and organises the case; a person, usually a local agent, still files it. Automation stops where the signature starts.

The sixth job is answering office actions, which DYI tracks by response deadline with plain colour coding: green when you are on track, amber when it is close, red when it has passed. The seventh job, grant, is not a software job at all. Examiners grant patents; software only makes sure you replied on time.

The last two jobs quietly kill small portfolios: deadlines and renewal fees. DYI does not wait for someone to remember to add a date to a calendar. Supported deadlines are calculated from the events you record, under written rules that are versioned and cited, and every date shows its working. Each deadline gets a risk score from 0 to 100 with green, amber and red levels.

A daily digest goes to the person responsible, a weekly report flags cases that are going quiet without a hard deadline, and private read-only feeds push everything into Outlook, Google or Apple Calendar. On money, DYI tracks more than 42 fee types across eight categories, in several currencies, with grace periods and date-accurate exchange rollups so you can see total spend in one reporting currency.

Around those nine jobs sits the record itself. Provisionals, PCT applications, continuations and national phase entries appear in one visual family tree, so you see the whole filing hierarchy at a glance. A loss of exclusivity timeline links a product to its patent wall and regulatory floor and lets you test what happens if you stop paying a renewal.

You can turn the live docket into a client-ready PDF with your own branding, stamped with a report ID and a checksum you can verify against the audit log. Moving off a spreadsheet means uploading it, previewing every row before anything is created, and confirming once, as a single transaction that rolls back safely if validation fails.

For regulated work, the controls are built in rather than bolted on. Edits to critical fields need a documented reason before they save. The audit trail records who changed what and when, with before and after values, and it is append-only, with no way to edit or delete history. Approvals require you to sign in again. Access is controlled by role, alongside tenant isolation, row-level database security, single sign-on, encryption and multi-factor login. These are product capabilities that support a 21 CFR Part 11-aligned workflow, not a compliance certificate.

The money tells the clearest story. Enterprise docketing licences have long run $25,000 to $100,000 or more a year, plus setup that can cost as much again. The DYI Starter plan is free during the private beta: unlimited patent families, provisional, PCT and national phase modules, office action and deadline tracking, renewal fee tracking, email reminders, exports and roles for up to five users. Compliance Pro adds the Part 11-aligned controls, electronic signatures, single sign-on, a foreign associate portal, regulatory data sync and dedicated onboarding, priced to your team and portfolio size. Your legal risk has not shrunk one bit; what collapsed is the fixed cost of administration. Spend the savings on the two things software cannot do: a good attorney reading your claims, and accurate translations. The moat was never the idea. It was the process wrapped around it, and that moat is draining fast.

The major benefit of AI in intellectual property is therefore not simply replacing professionals. Its real value lies in ELIMINATING REPETITIVE WORK, REDUCING DUPLICATE DATA ENTRY, IDENTIFYING RISKS EARLIER AND IMPROVING DECISION-MAKING. Patent attorneys, agents, inventors and R&D teams can spend more time on innovation, commercial strategy and claim strength rather than routine administration.

As technology continues to advance, the economics of patent protection will continue to change. What once required large teams and substantial legal budgets can increasingly be supported by intelligent software, automation and integrated workflows. For resource-constrained innovators, this represents a major opportunity to protect ideas more efficiently, manage global patent portfolios more effectively and compete on a larger scale.

IDEATE. PROTECT. PROSECUTE. MAINTAIN. SCALE.

Innovation should be expensive to create, not unnecessarily expensive to protect.

^Disclaimer

^{This article is for general information only. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not make anyone your lawyer. Patent law, fees and time limits differ from country to country and change often, and a missed deadline usually cannot be undone, so please take advice from a qualified patent attorney or patent agent before you act. The platform described is in private beta and under active development, so features, jurisdiction coverage and pricing stated as at September 2026 may change. The compliance controls mentioned are product capabilities, not a certification, and validation depends on how each organisation configures and uses the system. AI drafts, search results, calculated deadlines and fee schedules are working aids only. They can be wrong, and a qualified professional must review and sign off on every one, and remains responsible for the work. No liability is accepted for any loss arising from use of this material.}