Ability to get detailed info on Matter Inventors
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It would be nice if there was a way to easily pull or display more detailed info on all matter inventors from the Matter Details interface. For example, right now, it just shows you the name of each inventor. However, it would be really great if the interface could be updated to show (or optionally show) further info for each inventor, e.g., City/State/Country of residence, citizenship, assignee, and possibly other data (for example, a field that might show if they are ex-employees or active employees).
Most/all of the above info is actually very useful info to have on-hand when looking at a matter. For example, if any inventor is a resident of India, you would want to be able to easily figure that out so you can make sure to docket requesting an Indian foreign filing license. Similarly, if any inventor is a Greek citizen, you'd want to be able to easily detect that as well so you can make sure you file the first application in Greece. And if there are inventors that work for different entities/would assign to different entities, you'd want to know that up-front as well so that the proper assignments get generated.
Right now, the only ways to get all this info for the inventors in a matter are to:
a) Drill down inventor-by-inventor from the Matter Details screen. You have to click on each inventor's "View Contact" button, review the pop-up, and then close it. This technique does not let you see all of this info at once for all of the inventors. It also does not show all info for each inventor (although, to be fair, it does show most/all of the info I flagged above).
b) Create a form letter or email that has fields to show all this data, and then generate it. This is clunky/cumbersome.
c) Create a database query in Contacts module? I'm not even sure if you can do this. But even if you can, it would require leaving the Matter Details module for the Contacts module and then crafting a query. It should not require such steps to get easy access to this info.
I would propose that the Matter Details interface be updated to include a button below the "Add" button called "Summary" that, when clicked, would bring up a pop-up window that listed, in table form, all of the inventors, their as-filed names (if applicable), their citizenship, assignee/employer, city of residence, etc. Ideally, the listed data can be copied in table form and pasted in table form into other documents, e.g., Excel, Word, or Outlook. It would, in effect, act somewhat like the "View Contact" link, but for all inventors at once and showing the data in a table format.
And if you really wanted to gold-plate it, you could add the ability for any individual user to add/remove any column from the Contacts module to the table view and to change the column order as they see fit, similar to how users can modify the columns in the Contacts module itself. That would let users potentially add other fields to the display that might be relevant to them, e.g., a field like "Tags" that they maybe use to store indications of whether or not the inventor is an ex-employee or not, or perhaps "Private Notes" or "Nicknames" to provide more info on how to communicate with that inventor.
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Thanks Christian. We appreciate the feedback.
