IP Operations is the work between a firm’s systems: the mail, the dates, the filing, the client. Seven practices that show whether yours is run well.
The malpractice carrier’s renewal questionnaire lands in September. Same questions as last year. How does the firm track deadlines? Who confirms a filing went out? The ops director opens last year’s answer, reads her own paragraph about “redundant calendaring and supervisory review,” and stops with the cursor on the paste. She isn’t sure she could prove a word of it if someone asked.
That paragraph is about IP Operations, whatever the form calls it. IP Operations is the work between the systems a firm runs: sorting the mail, catching the dates, moving the filing, answering the client, whoever does the keystrokes.
The docketing system holds the dates. The document management system holds the files. IP Operations is everything that has to happen to get from one to the other and out the door.
So what does it look like when that work is run well? Not fast, though it usually is. Run well means the director can answer the questionnaire from the record instead of from memory. It means nobody has to ask. Here are seven practices, grouped by the question each one answers.
Can you see the work without asking anyone?
Every matter’s status is visible in one place, and nobody had to ask for it. A partner wants to know where a client’s portfolio stands. In a well-run shop the answer is on a screen, not in a hallway. Think about the ticket rail in a restaurant kitchen. The expediter never asks the grill cook how the steak is coming. The ticket is on the rail, in order, with its time on it. Your matters need a rail. If the honest answer to “where does this stand” is a person’s name, the operation isn’t run well yet, however good that person is.
Incoming mail is sorted and attached to the matter the day it arrives. Not the day someone gets to the pile. An office action that sits unsorted over a weekend is a response window quietly burning while nobody knows it’s there. Well-run practices treat intake as same-day work with an owner. The item gets identified, matched to its matter, routed to the attorney or paralegal who owns it, and put on the file before anyone has to go looking. Whether a person does that sorting or software does it matters less than whether it’s done by the end of the day. If your mornings still start with a pile of unsorted correspondence, that’s the first thing to fix.
Prep dates live in a system, not in someone’s head. The statutory date is on the docket. Good. But the draft to the attorney, the client’s sign-off, the references confirmed before the response goes out: those soft dates are where a case actually slips, and in most firms they’re in a spreadsheet, an Outlook flag, or a very reliable paralegal’s memory. A well-run operation gives every prep date a home the team can see, assigned to a person, sitting on top of the docket without touching it.
Three practices, one test. Could a new hire find the answer on day two?
Does the work run the same way when the usual person is out?
Every firm has the paralegal who knows exactly how a particular client wants things done. Their filing preferences, their approval chain, the two extra steps they insist on. That knowledge is valuable. And it’s a risk for exactly as long as it lives in one head.
Client-specific workflows are written down and run the same way every time. Not a policy binder. The actual sequence: who gets the draft first, what they check, where the approved version lives, how the next person knows it’s ready. Writing this down is tedious and nobody volunteers for it, which is why most firms haven’t. But in a well-run operation the client’s workflow is something the firm owns, so a matter handled by the backup on a Tuesday looks identical to one handled by the regular on a Monday. The client never learns who was out.
A handled date comes off the docket with proof, not an email chase. This one is easy to overlook because the work is invisible when it’s done right. A response goes out. The date should clear. In most firms the docketer now sends a reminder, then another, then a separate email per case, waiting for someone to confirm and attach the filing receipt. A well-run practice runs it the other way around. The person who did the work submits the request with the proof attached, docketing reviews and clears it, and the record of who cleared what, and why, keeps itself. That’s de-docketing as a controlled step instead of a favor.
The pattern in both: the firm, not a person, holds the way the work is done.
Who does the keystrokes, and does it matter?
This is the practice that separates firms that talk about control from firms that have it.
The firm decides, per workflow, who does the keystrokes, and keeps the record either way. Some firms run docketing in-house. Some send it to an outside service. Plenty do both, with their own team on the substantive work and an outside team on intake or data entry. A well-run operation has made that choice deliberately, workflow by workflow, for reasons it can state out loud. That’s the control part.
The choice part is that it stays a choice. The firm can bring a workflow back in, send another one out, or change providers, because the process is written down (the practice above) and the data lives where the firm can reach it.
And then the visibility part, which is the one that actually matters. Whoever does the keystrokes, the firm keeps the system of record, and the ops director can see all of the work in real time. Not a monthly report from the provider. Not a summary email. The same view of where every matter stands that the firm would have if its own people had typed every entry.
The in-house versus outsourced argument is the wrong argument, and it has wasted a lot of good meetings. Some firms send docketing out and run it beautifully, because they never gave up the record and they can see the outside team’s queue as clearly as their own. Some firms keep everything in-house and have no idea where the work is. The location of the keystrokes isn’t the variable. Two things are: whether you can see the work, and whether the record is yours.
If a provider’s work only shows up in your systems after the fact, or the matter data lives mainly in their tool and comes back to you as an export, the answer to both is no. That’s true no matter how good the provider is. It’s also true of an in-house team that works out of private spreadsheets.
Are you measuring the operation or the tools?
The operation is measured, not the tools. Most firms that measure at all measure the wrong thing. They know their docketing system’s uptime and how many licenses they pay for. They know how many matters are open. What they don’t know is where work waits, how many hands a filing passes through, or how long it takes from the mail arriving to the response going out.
Those are the numbers that describe the operation, and they don’t live in any single tool, which is why nobody has them. A well-run practice picks a few and tracks them on purpose. Where does work sit longest before someone picks it up? How many handoffs does a routine filing take? How many days from intake to client update? The numbers don’t have to be pretty. They have to exist, so the next hiring decision and the next vendor decision get made against something.
This is what the IP operations manager role exists to own, in the firms that have named it. And it’s why software built for this work is a different category from docketing software. A docketing system answers “when is it due?” An IP operations platform answers “who has it, is it ready, and what’s the client been told?” You can run all seven practices without one. It’s harder.
What can you do this month?
Don’t buy anything. Don’t reorganize anything.
Take one client, ideally a demanding one, and walk their matters against the seven practices above. For each one, write down the honest answer. Not the one for the questionnaire. Where the answer is “yes, and here’s the screen,” move on. Where the answer is “yes, but I’d have to ask someone,” you’ve found your list.
That list is your IP Operations agenda for the next year, already in priority order. If you want to go one step further, map the workflow behind the worst item on it. It takes an afternoon, and it usually explains the other six.
Next September the questionnaire comes back. The goal is to answer it from the record.
This piece is part of our series on what IP Operations is.