The ROI of Investing in Trademark Technology

While technology has fundamentally changed legal research, it has been slow to take hold in other areas.  Paper files and home-made spreadsheets are still the common tools of the trade in corporate legal departments.  Until recently, the legal department of a bio-tech company with $3.5 billion in sales had only one IT person.

The management of trademark portfolios is no exception. Companies, small and large, rely on paper files or spreadsheets which are inefficient, prone to containing risky data errors, without offering an analytical overview.

Change is in the wind.  The current recession has driven home corporate counsel’s need to reduce outside counsel fees and use technology to make smart business decisions.

Martha D. Arthos, a lawyer and IT expert in corporate legal technology confirms this, “Technology in corporate law departments continues to evolve. The most important recent trend for corporate law departments is analytics because it enables the general counsel to parse through volumes of data and make smarter decisions. Software is no longer just a tool for greater efficiency and improved quality, it is vital to key business decision-making.”