Patent Annuities: Pay or Lapse Decisions That Track the Roadmap and the Deadlines

Thirty renewal deadlines and a roadmap that does not sit still

Every patent in force carries a renewal fee on a schedule its jurisdiction sets, and every one of those fees is a small decision: keep paying because the patent covers a product that matters, or let it lapse because the product moved on or the company no longer sells in that market. A cycle of thirty patents is a few days of careful reading. The trouble is that the inputs move while the deadlines do not.

The official fee schedules and the product roadmap live in Box, each patent's family, product mapping and decision history sit on a Notion page, and outside counsel's deadline reminders arrive in the IP mailbox in Outlook. The paralegal's review report is a spreadsheet in Google Drive. When the roadmap shifts or a market exit is reversed, earlier decisions have to be revisited one by one, and a lapse that should have become a payment is easy to miss.

Who works in the room

Annuities have their own Kylon room, with Myco as the default agent, so any question about a patent's decision reaches it unnamed. Questions about the review report go to Ada, and anything that needs an answer from outside counsel or a product lead goes to Ryan. Myco reads the Outlook mailbox through a lasting grant its owner approved for this room, and the room guidelines say that mailbox is read only: reminders are evidence, and nothing is filed, flagged or answered from it. When a decision is approved, Myco mentions Ryan in the thread with the patent, the fee and the deadline, and Ryan takes it from there.

A decision cycle, end to end

The annuity policy, with its pay and lapse criteria and its grace-period rules, sits in Google Drive and in the room guidelines. An automation opens each monthly cycle with every patent due in the next ninety days, and each stage stops at a person before anything leaves the team.

Reversals reopen settled decisions

The hardest change is the one that undoes an earlier call. When leadership reverses a market exit, the patents set to lapse under it are not simply switched back to pay. Each one is re-decided against where its deadline stands now: still open, inside the grace period with a surcharge, or already past. Myco reopens exactly those patents, notes on each Notion page which decision it replaces and why, and leaves every other patent as it was.

Extensions and fee revisions work the same way. A batch of grace-period extensions from outside counsel shifts deadlines for the patents it names, not for every patent in the same country, and a revised fee table can move a patent across the policy's cost line, most often one already paying a grace surcharge. The thread shows each old deadline and fee next to the new one, so counsel decides from current figures.

What the checks catch

• A lapse decision made under the market exit that is still on record after the exit was reversed
• A deadline on a Notion page that disagrees with counsel's latest reminder in Outlook
• An extension applied to every patent in a jurisdiction when the batch named only some of them
• A patent now inside its grace period whose cost under the revised fee table crosses the policy's line
• A review report line that still shows a decision counsel has already changed

What stays with people

• Every pay or lapse decision, approved by IP counsel
• Confirming whether a patent still covers a planned product
• Sending instructions to outside counsel, which Ryan prepares as a draft in Gmail
• Signing the cycle close-out

Integrations in this workflow

Kylon is not an IP management system or an annuity payment service, and it replaces neither. It works across the documents, pages and mailboxes the IP team already keeps, and carries the coordination from one to the next.

• Box
• Gmail
• Google Drive
• Notion
• Outlook
• Slack

• Notion holds a page per patent with its family, product mapping, deadline and decision history
• Box keeps the official fee schedules and the product roadmap
• Outlook is the IP mailbox where outside counsel's reminders and extension notices arrive, read only for the agents
• Google Drive holds the annuity policy and the paralegal's review report
• Gmail carries instructions to outside counsel, each a draft the paralegal sends
• Slack is where product line leads answer coverage questions and post roadmap news

Where to start

Begin with the next quarter's deadlines in one group of jurisdictions. Connect the Notion database that holds your patent pages, point the room at the Box folder with the fee schedules and roadmap, and put the rule that matters in the room guidelines: agents propose pay or lapse decisions, IP counsel approves every one, and no instruction reaches outside counsel until a person sends it.

“A lapse is hard to take back, so every reopened patent gets a fresh decision before its deadline arrives.”

Set it up with your agent

Open a new Room, add your agent and paste this prompt. It connects the tools, builds the App with you and asks for your rules one step at a time, and nothing goes out until a person approves it.