Black Hills IP
Empowering IP Professionals with AI-Enabled Technology

Owing to a combination of technological changes and globalization, the legal services market has undergone a massive transformation. Innovation in this sector had been struggling for some time, but it has made significant strides over the last few years. At the same time, law firms across the globe are under enormous pressure to adapt to a marketplace led by clients who are cost-sensitive, and more quality-conscious. In this scenario, legal operations and services must be delivered with higher quality by augmenting traditional models with affordable and innovative technologies. Black Hills IP, a legal service provider, set out with the mission to empower IP professionals with the most efficient support possible through leveraging its innovation. The company has developed a novel way to perform docketing automatically, through their proprietary AI powered solutions. In an interview with CIO Applications, Russ Slifer, CEO of Black Hills IP, speaks about their technology and how it transforms legal services.

What led to the conception of Black Hills IP?

Black Hills IP was started as an on-shore U.S. based legal service provider that focused mainly on manual IP docketing and paralegal services. Our competitors were primarily based in India where the cost of labor was much lower compared to the U.S. As a legal service provider, we intended to expand and become more competitive in the global market. For that reason, we developed our own technology, which is capable of automating various legal services including docketing, renewals, paralegal support, and proofreading. Over the course of our journey, we have been successful in developing technology that provides more efficient, accurate, and faster legal service. We have developed the capability to perform the process of docketing through our AI-enabled technology. I like to think of Black Hills IP, more as a technology company than a legal service provider as we are providing our services through technology. We don't sell or license the underlying technology, but instead use it to perform the tasks for our customers. At Black Hills IP, we relentlessly innovate and constantly push technology to modernize all aspects of IP support. We always look forward to applying AI to other key areas of legal support.

Can you elaborate on the docketing service you provide?

While dealing with intellectual property rights and patents, there is a high level of interaction occurring between the applicants and the patent offices around the world. Such engagements often include huge volumes of data that are accessed and delivered by the patent office. In addition, Intellectual Property docketing involves the management of essential dates, data, and documentation from IP offices, as well as the tracking of crucial deadlines during the application process. We don’t sell any software, but our automated docketing and verification engine supports all intellectual property docketing software solutions. We can fully automate docketing operations with software including Patricia, Foundation IP, AppColl, and CPI.

Our software extracts information from the patent offices, perform an AI-based analysis and decision-making process of those documents and data, and then automatically populates the necessary docketing information into our customer's system. For our customers using other IP docketing software, we still use AI to guide our docketing team, a process that we call machine-guided docketing.
Give us a brief overview about other major services that you provide.

Paralegal service is a labor-intensive support service. We are providing skilled paralegals to assist our customers during a surge. We help them in the time when there are massive filings to be completed in a very short time or when they suffer from labor shortage. Our team is in the process of developing the technology to make our paralegals more efficient, accurate, and timely. We always look at improving any service we are delivering to our customers through technology. An example is the proofreading service. We can perform a substantial amount of patent proofreading through Optical Character Scanning (OCR) and the analysis of information extracted from patent offices. We don’t employ much human labor to perform these otherwise labor-intensive tasks.

We also provide a modern interface to manage our customer’s portfolio renewals. We are completely transparent on the renewal fees and charges, with no currency markup fee or any unnecessary foreign agent fees. More importantly, we provide free analytics to our customers through the platform and enable them to make intelligent decisions. Through this, customers can take immediate actions and manage their portfolio and renewals effectively.

Can you cite a client success story?

We work with both law firms and corporations. One of our clients, a multinational IP practitioner collaborated with us for our docketing services. Firstly, we analyzed their docketing procedures that were employing a lot of manual labor to perform legacy and redundant tasks. By working closely with them, we helped them understand and implement best practices to performing the process of docketing. We implemented modern docketing systems and got rid of unnecessary procedures. This client was not using the most modern docketing system that has an open API. For that reason, we worked with the vendor to develop an API to allow third parties, such as Black Hills IP, access to the docket system. With that, we implemented automated patent and trademark docketing for them. The system reduced manual labor significantly and made the process of docketing error free.

What are some of the key factors that differentiates your company?

One of the key differentiators is our vast industry experience. I was a chief patent counsel and the Deputy Director of the U.S Patent and Trademark Office. Our president, Ann McCrackin, has not only taught patent law, but practiced patent law for over 25 years. She was also heavily involved in the processes within a law firm and corporate management of the support services. Moreover, our CTO is also a former chief patent counsel. This experience allows us to understand what our customers are looking for while we create solutions. In addition to our industry experience, we lead the IP service industry in technology automation. There are some companies that claim to perform automation by merely downloading information from the patent office, but they fail to perform an actual machine analysis of the downloaded information. On the contrary, we perform true data analysis and decision making using AI, which humans have been doing for decades in the patent space. For that reason, we view ourselves as a technology company that strives to transform legal support services.

What is the future roadmap for your company?

Right now, we are focusing on spreading the word on our technology and its key differentiating factors. We have been working with some international companies, and we are planning to expand in both Europe and Asia. Plans to expand our services to new support areas are also underway. Our team has identified many labor-intensive tasks in this space and we are working toward developing the technology to automate it.