IP & trademark management made simple

Brand problem

Abdul Latif Jameel group (ALJ), the largest investment gateway into Saudi Arabia and the MENA region, manages the intellectual property rights (IP) registration of over 600 companies with more than 200 trademarks (TM) in different languages and countries. Obsolete administration processes, reliant on emails and excel sheets, were putting ALJ’s performance and reputation at risk. To continue delivering outstanding support to its partners around the world, ALJ needed Lemon’s help to reinvent their TM registration management approach.

Obsolete administration processes, reliant on emails and excel sheets, were putting ALJ’s performance and reputation at risk.

IP and TM registration is a tedious 7-step process that can take up to 6 months. It requires a continuous information exchange between different departments within an organisation and external service providers.

Initially, communication between ALJ’s internal departments and external legal teams in several geographies was a manual task resulting in an endless email thread. For each of the 7 steps, updates were entered into Excel sheets and circulated to all the entities involved. Whoever had the last email would have the latest version of the data. Consequently, there was always an outdated view of the data set. There was no visual interpretation of data either. For quarterly leadership meetings, the team would use traditional Microsoft tools to plot the latest registration data on the global map. More importantly, should one of the administrators leave the company, continuity, data accuracy and therefore the IP protection of ALJ, would be at risk.

Lemon thinking

Solution

But Lemon loves challenges! With our advanced solution we shifted the whole journey from excel sheets and emails to one application that the client proudly calls “the central source of truth”.

• We created a role-based secure web application that captures all data generated at any step of the registration process by internal and external entities. External legal teams have role-based access to upload and view their role-related data and can communicate through the application. The internal teams have full and real-time visibility of the registration status.
• For better reporting and easier decision-making, we designed a dashboard that reflects real-time data and automatically transforms it into visual formats – maps, graphs, tables, pie charts and calendars.
• e added automated notifications and task reminders for every time status changes or a TM registration is about to expire. The calendar of expiries appears on the dashboard.
• We designed the application to go beyond data collection, aggregation and presentation and made the data extendable to various functions within the organisation. The financial data captured in the system for each registration step allows the Finance Department to process invoices much faster without asking law firms to provide supporting documentation.
• Finally, getting people to change their behaviour was the biggest win of all. The internal adoption of the new platform happened gradually within a year. To facilitate the transition, we delivered numerous trainings at multiple levels.

Creating “the central source of truth” was a significant step towards a successful transformation of AJL to meet the challenges of the fast-moving, certainty-poor and highly digitised global economy.