Supervising Patent Tasks as a Secondary Responsibility — A Guide for Supervisors in SMEs

This article builds on the previous posts “Suddenly Responsible for Patents” and “Patent Work: What Early-Career Professionals Can Do — and What They Should Not Do”.

While those articles focus on the situation and task boundaries, this guide addresses supervisors and explains how patent tasks should be assigned and managed in practice.

In many SMEs, patent-related tasks are not handled by dedicated specialists. Instead, supervisors assign patent work as a secondary responsibility alongside development, engineering, or product tasks—often to early-career professionals.

The Core Principle

Patent tasks assigned as a secondary responsibility are informational, not evaluative.

The purpose is to create transparency and orientation, not legal or strategic decisions. This principle should guide every assignment from the beginning.

What Supervisors Should Assign

Supervisors may assign early-career professionals to the following patent-related activities:

• Identifying relevant patents, including both third-party patents and the company’s own patents.
• Collecting factual information such as applicant, filing and publication dates, number of filings, and countries of protection.
• Structuring patents using a defined internal system (for example by product, function, or technology).
• Adding short technical comments explaining relevance or non-relevance.
• Recording and monitoring a simplified legal status (granted, pending, expired).
• Preparing structured information so that experienced colleagues can decide on further action.

The expected output is structured patent information, not conclusions.

What Supervisors Must Explicitly Exclude

Supervisors must ensure that early-career professionals are not asked to:

• Analyze or interpret patent claims.
• Assess scope of protection.
• Perform legal risk or Freedom-to-Operate analyses.
• State whether a technology is safe, blocked, or critical.

These activities require legal expertise and remain the responsibility of qualified experts or patent attorneys.

Time Frame and Expectations

Patent work is a secondary responsibility and must remain limited in scope.

Supervisors should ensure that:

• The effort stays within approximately 10–15 % of working time.
• Core responsibilities are not compromised.
• Scope creep into legal evaluation is actively prevented.

If patent tasks begin to dominate daily work, the setup is no longer appropriate.

The Role of the Supervisor

The supervisor’s role is to:

• Define tasks and boundaries clearly before assignment.
• Provide a clear classification framework.
• Review outputs for structure and completeness rather than legal correctness.
• Escalate questions involving legal interpretation to experienced professionals.

Effective supervision protects both the employee and the organization.

Supervisor Checklist

Use this checklist to verify that patent-related tasks are correctly assigned and supervised.

Before Assigning Tasks

• Patent work is explicitly defined as a secondary responsibility.
• Task scope is limited to information, not evaluation.
• Relevant technology fields or competitors are clearly defined.
• An internal classification system is available and understood.

During the Task

• Only factual data are collected (applicant, dates, countries of protection).
• Third-party and own patents are handled in the same system.
• Each patent has a short, technical, non-legal comment.
• Only a simplified legal status is recorded (granted, pending, expired).

Review and Follow-Up

• Results are reviewed for structure and completeness, not legal correctness.
• Questions involving claims or legal risk are escalated.
• Scope creep into legal interpretation is actively prevented.

If several items cannot be checked, the task definition should be revised.

Why This Matters

Without clear supervision, patent tasks tend to drift from information gathering into interpretation and decision-making. This creates false confidence, unnecessary risk, and frustration.

With clear boundaries and guidance, patent-related work remains manageable, efficient, and valuable— even when handled as a secondary responsibility.