As KT Extranet Reaches Anniversary Milestone, Firm Announces 4th Patent Issued for Innovative, Client-Friendly Tool

ATLANTA (January 24, 2022) — Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton’s patent practice is internationally renowned and has helped thousands of clients protect their innovative IP. Now, the firm has joined the ranks of its clients in becoming a patent owner itself.

Three years ago on January 22, 2019, Kilpatrick Townsend launched an enhanced patent prosecution extranet—the KT Extranet—a secure web portal that offers clients unparalleled access to their patent portfolios, including a visually compelling snapshot of a company’s patent family trees.

Key features of the KT Extranet include:

• patent family trees showing relationships between patent applications;
• a browse-friendly forest of patent family trees showing a company’s entire portfolio;
• status, calendar, and docket information for each patent application; and
• downloadable, exportable data.

After searching far and wide for a third-party solution to organize and display patent information but finding no options that provided the client-centered features for which the firm was looking, Kilpatrick Townsend’s internal engineering resources rolled up their sleeves and built the solution invented by Partner Mark Mathison and veteran Applications Architect Trajan Unger.

Partner Nesli Doran-Civan and Associate Adam Baumgartner filed and prosecuted several utility and design patent applications to protect Mark’s and Trajan’s inventions and the firm’s innovative approach to the fully automated visual representation of patent family data (pictured above).

Besides two design patents granted last year, two utility patents were granted this January. U.S. Patent No. 11,222,050 is titled “Graphically Representing Related Patent Families using a Phantom Parent Node” and relates to wrapping canonical hierarchy charting algorithms so that distinct family trees can be placed next to each other. U.S. Patent No. 11,226,996 is titled “Identifying and Graphically Representing Multiple Parent Nodes of a Child Node” and relates to enhancing canonical hierarchy charting algorithms so that they may show any number of parents for an application. In contrast to binary search trees and other computer science structures in which each node only has one parent, patent applications can have multiple parents, such as multiple provisionals. Other patents are pending.

The inventions covered by Kilpatrick Townsend’s patent applications have a number of practical benefits for clients, including the following:

• One can learn about his or her company’s patent portfolio without having to sift through the company’s emails, docket, or databases.

• A client can find a particular patent or application by browsing a “forest” of family trees, which can be quicker than typing in a reference number. Once found, data for an application reveals the next docket action and who, specifically which attorney or patent agent at the firm, is responsible for the work.

• Company executives will appreciate the visual simplicity and elegance of patent family trees. Each box within a tree represents a patent application and is flagged for its country of filing. The tree conveys a progression from early provisional applications at the top to later national phase and continuation/divisional applications at the bottom. Automatically rendered with the latest, color-coded statuses from the firm’s database, users can cut and paste the trees into company presentations or reports.

The KT Extranet is so helpful that Kilpatrick Townsend uses it to track its own 4 patents and 6 patents pending (mobile version pictured above). Stay tuned for more news about future patent allowances and issuances.

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