How to build an IP operations function from nothing: what it owns on day one, the first hire, run it or send it out, and the record the firm keeps.
The managing partner found out on a Thursday, and not from an audit. A paralegal mentioned, in passing, that the foreign filing deadlines for the lateral group that joined in March live in a spreadsheet on her desktop, and that she’s the only one who knows which tab is current.
That’s how most IP operations functions get started. Not with a plan. With a moment.
IP operations is the work that happens because of the docket: the mail gets sorted, the deadline gets caught, the filing goes out, the client gets an answer. A docketing system holds the dates. Somebody has to own everything the dates set in motion. When nobody does, the work still happens. It just happens in a spreadsheet, in one person’s head, and in a reply-all thread nobody can find later.
Building the function on purpose is a different job, and the order matters.
What does an IP operations function own on day one?
Four things, and you should name them out loud before the first hire starts.
The mail. Every piece of office correspondence, foreign associate email and client instruction that arrives, and where it goes next. Who opens it, who links it to the matter, who tells the attorney.
The dates. Not just entering them. Knowing which ones are statutory and which ones are the firm’s own prep dates, and who’s allowed to move each kind.
The filings. The forms, the IDS, the fee calculation, the signature, the package that goes out. Assembled the same way every time, whoever assembled it.
The client answer. When a client asks where things stand, one person can produce the answer from one place without three phone calls.
That last one is the tell. If status still takes three calls after the function exists, the function exists on the org chart and nowhere else. We wrote up what the person who owns this actually does Monday through Friday, and the day-one list is shorter than the job description. Mail, dates, filings, client answers. Everything else the function will eventually own grows out of those four.
Should we run docketing ourselves or use a service, and which keeps us in control?
Choose per workflow, and whatever you choose, the firm owns the system of record and can see all of the work in real time. That’s the answer. Staff the docket in-house, send it to a service, or split it so your people handle the client-facing steps and a vendor handles the data entry. All three work. The one thing that can’t be delegated is the record, and the visibility into it.
The instinct at most firms is to argue in-house versus outsourced as a matter of principle. Skip that argument. It produces the wrong function. A firm that sends docketing out and can still see every matter, every date and every open task from its own system is better run than a firm that staffs the whole thing and can’t. Control was never about whose payroll the docketer is on. It’s about who holds the record.
A general contractor doesn’t pour the concrete or hang the drywall. Subs do that. But the GC holds the drawings, the schedule and the inspection log, and every sub works off the GC’s set. Hand the drawings to the sub and you aren’t the GC anymore. You’re a spectator who signed the contract.
So walk the four day-one items and decide each one. Mail intake is a strong candidate for a service or for automation, because it’s high volume and rules-based. Client answers should stay with your people, because the client hired your firm. Date entry can go either way. Filing assembly usually stays in-house until the firm has enough volume to make a specialist worth it. There’s no single right split. There is a wrong one: any split where the vendor’s system becomes the only place the truth lives.
One more thing before you sign anything, and it’s the managing partner’s question. If the service enters a date wrong, who carries it? You do. In Robinson v. CPA Global (Georgia Court of Appeals, 2024), a law firm relied on national stage deadlines its docketing vendor had entered, the dates were wrong, and the filings were missed. The client sued the vendor and lost, because he had no contract with the vendor. The claim against the firm went forward separately. That’s the principle: the vendor’s error doesn’t move the exposure off the firm whose name is on the engagement letter. Services are still worth using. What the case argues for is your own record of every date, whoever typed it in, checkable without asking anyone’s permission.
If you want a side-by-side of running the operation yourself versus handing it to a service, we’ve written one.
Who should the first hire be?
Not a docketing specialist, unless you need one for volume. The first hire is the person who owns the four things above and can write them down.
Look for someone who has run a docket rather than worked one. Someone who can explain the difference between a statutory deadline and an internal prep date to a partner in under a minute. Someone who has been through a system change and can tell you what broke. Someone who reads a client’s outside counsel guidelines and turns them into steps a paralegal can follow. And someone who is comfortable telling an attorney no, the response isn’t going out until the IDS is in.
Resist the urge to make this hire a senior paralegal with a new title and the same desk. If the person can’t change how the mail moves or who approves what, they aren’t running operations. They’re doing docketing with extra meetings. We’ve made the case for hiring the operations role before the next paralegal in detail. The short version: one ops hire who makes the work visible does more for the practice than two paralegals hired into a fog.
What should you write down before buying anything?
This is the section partners skip. Don’t.
The most common mistake in building an IP operations function is buying the tool first and writing the workflow second. The tool then becomes the workflow by default, shaped by whatever the vendor’s demo happened to show. A couple of years later the firm has a system nobody fully uses and a set of workarounds nobody wrote down. That’s expensive, and it’s avoidable.
You need four documents, and plain ones. A shared doc is fine.
1. The workflow map. How a piece of mail becomes a filed response, step by step, as it actually happens today. Not the clean version. The real one, with the reply-all thread and the manual folder check. Here’s how to map one in an afternoon.
2. Who approves what. Which steps need an attorney’s sign-off, which a paralegal can clear alone, and who can move a date. Write the names, not the roles, then check whether the names make sense.
3. Which dates are prep dates and which are statutory. Your docket holds both, and they look the same on a calendar. A prep date exists so the firm doesn’t crowd the statutory one. It can move. The statutory one can’t. Any system you buy, and any service you hire, needs to know the difference, and so does every person who touches the docket.
4. What the client gets, and when. The status report, the filing confirmation, the cost estimate before the fee is incurred. For each client, or each client type. This is the document that turns outside counsel guidelines from a PDF into a workflow.
Once those four exist, a purchase decision gets simple. You’re no longer asking what the software can do. You’re asking whether it can run the map you drew. That’s a much shorter demo. If you want the definitional version of what an IP operations platform does and doesn’t do, we’ve written that up too, but the point stands with or without software. Write the workflow, then buy.
This takes longer than the partners want. The map alone will surface disagreements about who owns what that nobody was eager to have. Have them anyway. Having them in a conference room is cheaper than having them after a missed deadline.
What does good look like at 90 days?
Not a dashboard. Outcomes.
A client emails to ask where things stand on a family of matters and gets one answer, from one person, without a hallway conference. The mail that arrived this morning is on the right matter by lunch, and the attorney knows it’s there. When a partner asks whether a date can move, somebody can say yes or no on the spot, because the docket says which kind of date it is. The filing packages look the same regardless of who assembled them.
And if you chose a service for some of the keystrokes, this: the firm can open its own system and see every date the vendor entered, when they entered it, and what happened next. If the arrangement ends, the operation doesn’t walk out with it.
That last one is the test, because a hire can leave. A function belongs to the firm.
That’s the idea PracticeLink is built on, and it holds with or without a purchase. The keystrokes can happen anywhere, in-house or out. The record, and the view of it, stay with the firm.
Start with the four things. Write them down. Then decide who types.