Software company iPaladin, established in 2012 and used by more than 160 family offices to manage documents and data, is celebrating two developments in its recent efforts to defend its intellectual property.
Earlier this month, the company received notice from the United States Patent and Trademark Office that its fourth patent would be allowed, meaning the office has reviewed iPaladin’s application and found it eligible. Once the software company files additional documents and pays fees, the patent for "Data Processing System and Method for Managing Enterprise Information" is expected to be issued this fall.
The patent’s description might seem broad, and that was the intention. The company sought to protect its system built to help family offices “experience the governed record,” which can include a multitude of different documents and layers of decision-making.
In a statement describing what is protected, iPaladin said: “Under the allowed claims, any authorized person, from any instance of the application, anywhere the family operates, can retrieve a record and see its actual historical content, the document as it truly appeared on any given date, not merely information about its versions, with every result filtered by what that person is permitted to see.”
The exact scope of what iPaladin’s other patents protect is already being contested in court. Modus was the first to report that in September 2024, iPaladin sued Orca, a Swiss competitor, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, alleging patent infringements. Orca has denied the allegations.
That lawsuit is ongoing, but iPaladin received a favorable ruling from a judge this week.
Orca argued in court that iPaladin’s patents are overly broad in their descriptions, making it unfairly hard for it to defend itself at trial. It asked the court to adopt specific words and phrases in the patent claims. On Tuesday, Judge Ed Kinkeade determined that specificity was not necessary in this case, and the trial can proceed with iPaladin’s claims as written.
To iPaladin, the new patent and ruling are two battles won in a potentially wider legal offensive; last year, Modus reported that it sent notices to 12 additional companies that may have copied its system. The software company has declined to say who it sent letters to, but said at the time a few firms had responded quickly. Many different firms could be possible letter-receivers, on the Modus technology market map and beyond.
"The Patent Office confirmed that our newest innovations deserve protection, and a federal court confirmed that our existing patents mean exactly what they say. We built this architecture beginning in 2010 and started patenting it in 2017. Both branches of the system that examine intellectual property have now looked at it closely, and it held,” Jill Creager, founder and CEO of iPaladin, said in a statement. Creager is an inventor on all four patents.
Late last year, iPaladin told Modus it planned to raise capital from investors. Creager declined to comment further on the fourth patent, her company’s lawsuit against Orca, and iPaladin’s fundraising.
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I'll be...
- Meeting some friends in Mystic, Connecticut. We’re going to Mystic Pizza (obviously), but what else shouldn’t we miss?
- Watching the final two World Cup games somewhere.
- Outside Edmonton, Alberta, at “the cabin” for the August long weekend.
- In Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zurich and Dubrovnik in mid-August. Who are some family-office people in Switzerland I have to meet?
