Parties

The Parties page is your personal master list of the people and organisations you name on applications. It lives on your account, not on any one matter. Every party you add here is reusable across every matter and every application you draft. Switch between the People and Organisations tabs using the toggle in the page toolbar, or the switcher in the breadcrumb.

Why a party list

Most patent practitioners name the same handful of parties again and again: the same in-house engineers across many filings, the same parent company on every application. Keeping them in one place means you enter an address once, fix a typo once, and every future application picks up the corrected detail.

A party is a person or an organisation, nothing more. Whether someone acts as an inventor or an applicant is decided per application, when you attach them (see Matters). The same person can be the inventor on one filing, the applicant on another, or both at once on the same filing, all from a single entry here. Only people can be inventors; applicants can be people or organisations.

You can also keep parties that aren't attached to anything yet: correspondents, agents, or contacts you expect to need later. They simply sit in the list with an Applications count of 0.

Adding a party

Click Add person or Add organisation in the top-right corner of the page. This creates the entry right away and opens its own page, ready for you to fill in.

Editing a party

Click anywhere on a row to open that party's page. Each field saves on its own as soon as you leave it (tab to the next field or click elsewhere); there is no separate save step and nothing to cancel.

The page has four parts:

• Identity: name, plus nationality for a person.
• Address: street, city, state or region, postal code, and country. Together with the name, this is the bibliographic data that appears on filings.

Nationality and Country are both pickers, not text fields: you choose from the ISO 3166 country list rather than typing a name. That keeps one country spelled one way across your whole list, so sorting and searching by country group the way you expect, and it is the form the EPO and USPTO ask for on a filing. Searching accepts either the country name or its two-letter code.

The two fields stay separate on purpose. Nationality is the state a person is a national of; country is where they live or where an organisation has its place of business. The EPO asks for both, and for many people they differ (a German national living in Zurich).

• Contact details: email, phone, and notes. These are private working notes for your own reference. They never appear on a filing, so they carry no version history: what you see is always the current value.
• For a person, an Employer field linking to one of your organisations (or none), with a link through to that organisation's page. For an organisation, a list of the people whose employer is set to it, each linking to that person's page.

The page also shows a read-only Applications panel: every application this party is attached to, with each version listed underneath it, the role the party holds on that version (inventor or applicant), and whether the version is the working draft or frozen. An application appears once no matter how many of its versions name the party.

The "Applications" column

The right-hand column shows how many distinct applications currently have this party attached, in any role. Hover the number to see a list of the application titles.

The count is by distinct application: a party attached to several versions of the same application, or in both roles on one application, counts once.

Edits and frozen versions

Editing a party's identity (name, nationality, or address) updates the live row only. Frozen versions are immune. A version that was already saved keeps the exact name and address you had at that moment. Renaming a person here does not rewrite filings you have already named them on. See the Versioning tab for the full snapshot contract.

This is the point of the list-plus-snapshot split: you can fix typos, update addresses, and rename parties freely in the master list without disturbing the record of who was named on which filing.

Contact details (email, phone, notes) sit outside this contract entirely: they are address book information, not bibliographic data, so they never appear on a filing and are never snapshotted. Editing them changes what you see everywhere, immediately, with nothing to reconcile against a frozen version.

Deleting a party

Open the party's page and click Delete. A confirmation dialog appears.

Delete is hard-blocked when the party is in use. If the party is attached to one or more applications, the delete is rejected and the dialog shows you which applications are blocking. You have to detach the party from each of those applications first.

This is intentional: a deleted party has no row to render from in any live current draft. Frozen versions are unaffected either way (they carry their own snapshot), but live drafts would lose the reference.