FAQs

We are Amlex-IP, an IP-Tech Advisory company, established in September 2023. Our brand is a fusion of our founders names.

Amlex-IP was established to close the gap in the market and address the urgent need for support, advice, coaching and action when it comes to change management and transformation.

Amlex-IP thrives on the responsibility of handling the overwhelming and burdensome tasks associated to change by breaking it down to manageable steps and phases. As an independent consultancy our agenda is helping you or your clients meet their agendas.

Amlex-IP manages change in the IP industry. Please refer to 'Our Services' page.

Our 'IP Transformation as a Service' (IPTaaS) is a robust and comprehensive framework in working with you to understand how you operate, what you need, what solutions would meet those needs, engaging and negotiating with those suppliers; to ultimately project managing the onboarding phase. Thereafter, we offer a low ongoing subscription cost to monitor the RoI of the systems you have adopted and to ensure your operations continue to be optimised. An IPTaaS project could be as broad to incorporate every element of your practice (e.g. an IP Management System) or narrow requiring particular focus (e.g. trademark watching).

To complement our main services, we also offer outsourced Project Management, incorporating data management, IP Paralegal Support or bespoke/customised special projects to IP departments both in house and law/IP firms. 

Our position in the industry is rare, we offer a service independent of any specific product or tool, we are not tied to a particular service provider. Our knowledge of the IP supplier space is extensive and is growing week by week. This enables us to solely focus on setting you up for optimal efficiency, with effective operations and seamless workflows. This will allow you to focus on what you are good at - maximising the commercial value of yours or your clients IP portfolio while savings costs on the tools that underpin your commercialisation efforts.

No. Absolutely not. We cannot remain independent if you delegate decision making responsibility to us. 

Instead, we will objectively provide you with your options, with pro's and con's tied to your operational workflows, budgetary constraints and any other factor we include between us during our planning/strategy phase.

Ultimately, the service provider will have a direct relationship with you. They will support you directly, unless you wanted to delegate the management of your suppliers to us.

You would be right - or at least they should, but not from an unbiased position.

Imagine having 5 solutions and only 2 or 3 of them closely resemble what you need. For the others, you would have to accommodate a compromise. The supplier could be shoehorning their products into your needs and that is unlikely to be a sustainable - or a long term comfortable fit.

Our independence allows us to weigh up these options by preventing that shoehorned approach.

IP departments are high pace environments, constantly striving to meet deadlines. Teams are typically time poor so seldom have the resources to look for new tools that could revolutionise the operational efficiency of the department.

As a result, departments become "efficiently inefficient". It is this process - of being too busy to take action, where inertia arrives from continued success.

As every day that passes the importance of IP management, the need for reliable and more integrated solutions increases. Couple with external influences such as Covid-induced hybrid working, ever-evolving tech and the explosion of Generative AI, keeping on top of the supplier space with new and emerging players is almost impossible. 

Amlex-IP has a head start. Alex and Aman have been in the industry for many years in various capacities. Leave the job of knowing the supplier space to us and we will present you with the right options to match your specific needs. 

We do not make the decisions for you, we will present you with a range solutions for the job and give you the information to make as informed and objective decision as possible. 

By independent, we mean agnostic. We have no incentive to take sides or force specific products into your arsenal. Our aim is to simply consult on the best way for your IP department to lower costs where possible, optimise the way you operate and help you to achieve a seamless workflow enabling growth and maximising financial returns. 

That's up to you. You may be using the best tools for your department, but not using them optimally. If this is the case, we will work with you and your suppliers to ensure workflows are optimised and the tools you already pay for are working for you in a cost-effective way. 

We don’t believe in copy and paste and we don’t believe in workarounds, but if manual tasks are minimised, you will already likely gain a unit or few every hour which would have a significant cumulative and compound benefit. Our service is bespoke to your specific needs.

We accept that being efficient is not necessarily in the interest of the associate recording their time against a billable target. However, there are tasks that you may wish to convert to fixed fees, or are undertaking under retainer or a cost cap; and therefore being efficient at those tasks makes them more profitable, depending upon your model.

There is also the school of thought (see our blog post on billable time) that believes that  switching the focus from hours billed to value delivered can improve client relationships and result in more work. This then enables greater adoption of technology which helps broaden client relationships - and makes the client more dependent on you. 

"Technology can potentially give you real insight into the client's issues, which gives you a chance to pitch for a lot more of their work and also makes the client more wedded to you, which means it's not going to be so easy for them to move away."

While we may be the antithesis of promoting the billing of inefficient time - and therefore we're unlikely to be the solution for you, we are also very much aware of the emergence of the disruptors in the market who are billing value. These progressive models promote the use of technology and efficiency. We are also unaware of any corporate IP Department that wants to be billed for outside counsel inefficient time.

If you are being disrupted, we will likely be able to help you.

Our pricing is entirely bespoke to the scope of your project and requirements.

We start with an hourly rate assigned to the tasks required within the framework we have. This is flexible with a number of assumptions built in. This will give us a total project cost. Our preference will always be a fixed/flat fee arrangement making it easier to manage expectations on both sides. 

We can also price on an hourly, daily or weekly basis but these charges would be higher than our fixed costs.

Over the last few years, we have seen several law firms recruit full-time ‘tech evangelists’ (for want of a better phrase). We wholly support this investment as it proves that they have recognised a specific skillset is required for change management. However, change does not always warrant the need for a full-time resource. The benefit of using Amlex-IP is that we come as a team, with complementing skill sets and in almost all but exceptional circumstances, most likely at a lesser cost than a full-time resource.

Our starting point is a high-level Interview followed by a key stakeholder Workshop. Both are chargeable upfront (but are deductible against a full project instruction) where we will get to know you, your team, your processes and workflows and the tools you use to facilitate your daily tasks. Thereafter, any further consultation, or ongoing project management would be structured as 50% payment up front, 25% at the halfway stage and 25% upon completion.