Win clients

Two ways to find applicants who are not clients yet, using what they already file in your jurisdiction.

In this document

• Find foreign applicants with significant filing activity in your jurisdiction, to build a target list.
• Find foreign applicants with fragmented representation, to find the ones whose work is already split and therefore winnable.

Related, but covered elsewhere

• Finding law firms rather than applicants is in Build partnerships.
• Seeing which firms your competitors act for, and how the local market is moving, is in Defend relationships.
• Choosing which technology or jurisdiction to target before building a list is in Grow further.

1. Find foreign applicants with significant filing activity in your jurisdiction #

This produces a list of applicants filing into your jurisdiction, with the option to exclude the ones already represented by your firm.

Set up the search #

1. Click Search in the sidebar.
2. In the first input, choose Applicants.
3. Set the location filter to from and choose the applicants’ country or region, for example the United States.
4. In file at, choose the publication authority you want filings at, for example Canada.
5. Set the year type to Prosecuted for patents, then set the from and to years. Avoid the most recent year for patents, because publication lags.

Add charts and filters #

Charts answer the questions that decide whether an applicant is worth approaching:

• Important Representatives: who acts for these applicants, and which firms represent them locally.
• Technical Areas & Fields: where their filings are concentrated.

Use Add Filter to narrow the list, for instance by a minimum number of filings.

Worked example #

A Canadian firm looking for US companies filing in Canada that are not already clients:

• Applicants, from United States
• file at Canada
• Year type Prosecuted, a two-year range
• Add Important Representatives to see who acts for them in Canada
• Add a Number of Filings filter to set a floor
• Add a Representative Name filter set to not equals your own firm, which removes your existing clients from the list

That last filter is what turns a list of active applicants into a list of prospects.

2. Find foreign applicants with fragmented representation #

Applicants whose filings are spread across several law firms have no single entrenched relationship, which makes them the more realistic targets for consolidating work.

Set up the search #

1. Click Search in the sidebar.
2. In the first input, choose Applicants, then set the location filter to from.
3. Leave the country field blank, which includes applicants from every country and region.
4. In file at, select your own jurisdiction’s publication authority.
5. Set the year type to Prosecuted and choose a range, for example 2020 to 2024. Avoid the latest year for patents.

Add the chart that does the work #

In Add Chart, select Important Representatives Over Time. For each applicant it shows which law firms represented them year by year, and how many filings went to each. That year-by-year split is what reveals fragmentation; a single total would hide it.

Exclude domestic applicants #

1. Click Add Filter and choose Applicant Country.
2. Change the operator from equals to not equals.
3. Select your own country. The results now contain foreign applicants only.

Further filters such as Decision Maker, Number of Filings or a technical field narrow it further.

Reading the result #

• Applicants whose filings are spread across several firms are the consolidation targets.
• Applicants who have used one firm for years are harder to approach, because that relationship is established.

Export for closer analysis #

The export control on the right downloads the results as an Excel file with two sheets. Sheet 1 lists the applicants with their total matching filings. Sheet 2 gives, for each applicant and each year, the firms that represented them and how many filings each handled.

Sheet 2 is the one worth pivoting: it makes the degree of fragmentation visible per applicant across years, which is hard to judge by eye in the chart.

Worked example #

Foreign applicants filing in Canada that use several firms:

• Applicants, file at Canada
• Year type Prosecuted, 2020 to 2024
• Add Important Representatives Over Time
• Add Applicant Country not equals Canada
• Export, then pivot sheet 2 to see which applicants used multiple firms across years