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 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 a Used in count of 0.
Adding a party
Click Add person or Add organisation in the top-right corner of the page. A dialog opens with the same form you see when editing an existing row:
- People: name, nationality, and address.
- Organisations: name and address.
Save closes the dialog and adds the row to the top of the list. Cancel closes without changes.
Editing a party
Click anywhere on a row to open it in a dialog with the same fields. Make your changes and click Save in the dialog footer. Cancel discards them. Pressing Escape is equivalent to Cancel.
The "Used in" 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 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.
Deleting a party
Open the row's editor and click Delete in the footer (next to Cancel and Save). 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.