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Continuing my series on “quick and dirty” process improvement initiatives that don’t cost anything to implement:

Initiative # 4: Review your docket progressions

In my many years of working with IP docket groups, both in-house and in law firms, I’ve observed that there are as many approaches to managing docket progressions as there are IP practices. Some have little structure and docket most actions as “ad-hoc”, while other engineer every possible interaction with the docket system to anticipate every plausible scenario.Of course, you can likely predict that my suggestion would be to find a balance that’s middle-of-the-road. What I can say is that most every IP practice can benefit from a review of their docketing procedures.

I generally recommend that all IP dockets be governed by policies and procedures agreed upon and published by a docket committee. It’s possible to meet every practitioner’s needs with today’s modern IP management systems, but so many progressions configurations get convoluted by over-engineered processes. The results are overly complicated and long docket reports that, to the dismay of risk managers everywhere, are largely ignored because they’re impractical.

My suggestions for corralling the docketing beast:

1. Use your progressions as a framework: don’t over-engineer the process, and allow well-trained docket staff to manage exception scenarios.

2. Focus your dockets on official dates and compliance with regulatory requirements for reminders, extensions, etc. No non-official dates in the docket, and no personal dates.

3. Use integrations with calendaring and messaging system to accommodate individual needs. By integrating your docket system with Outlook Exchange, you can push deadlines to users, and allow them to manage reminders, ticklers, etc. individually in their own calendars. They can also use the Outlook calendar for managing case-related appointments, but appropriately separately from the firm official docket.