Creating task types with a Response Date on an anniversary beginning after an event
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China annuities are due each year on the anniversary of the filing date beginning after the patent is granted. I have a task for paying the grant fee and I enter the IssueDate when known. What Trigger Events and combination of Response Dates would cause the task to be generated around when the patent issues and regenerated each year thereafter?
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@jonah-soundhound-com A simpler way to do it would be to just generate a bunch of annual docket entries for the entire lifetime of the patent all at once, just like some systems generate a docket entry for each extension of time that's possible for a response when an office action arrives.
But I hate seeing all of those future entries and having to clear them if they're not needed, so I prefer a more complicated configuration that only generates each docket entry when it's needed. A little careful work up front pays off over time.
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@RichardS3059 Thank you. That is clever. Definitely not simple, but clever.
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@RichardS3059 Thinking about this some more, I think this might work. Keep my CN First Annuity task as is but change the CN Pay Annuity task to trigger off completion of the CN First Annuity task instead of setting the filing date. That would avoid the need to close annuity tasks with Not Needed until issuance, I think.
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@jonah-soundhound-com I agree. There's no way to do this quite right in AppColl today. What I've done is to create two CN annuity tasks:
CN Pay First Annuity - triggered when Allowance Date gets a value for a CN patent application. The response date is based on the allowance date with an offset of 2 months and 0 days. It's a Hard External Deadline. That date isn't quite correct, because the actual first due date is specified in the notice of grant, but it should be conservative.
CN Pay Annuity - triggered whenever a CN patent application FilingDate field gets any value or whenever a CN Pay Annuity task completes. The response date for this task is based on the official filing date offset by 12M/0D or, if later, the triggering task respond-by date offset by 12M/0D. It's a Hard External Deadline. Until issue, I just close these with Not Needed.
That setup doesn't account for the 6-month grace period and I need to fix that. What I usually do for countries with grace periods is set 3 tasks. The first one is triggered on the normal due date or completion of first one or the third one. The second is triggered by a Missed completion of the 1st one or the third one. The third one is triggered by completion of the second one.
For example, here are my three tasks for paying DE annuities:
DE Pay Annuity first deadline - triggered by either setting a filing date in a DE patent application or by a DE Pay Annuity first deadline task completing with Completed or by a DE Pay Annuity first deadline(2) task completing with Completed. It's an Extendible External task. The response date is set to the matter filing date +12M/0D with a final deadline offset of 18M/0D or if later, the triggering task's respond-by date +12M/0D with a final deadline offset of 18M/0D. Completion states are defined for Completed and Missed, with an auto-close of Missed.
DE Pay Annuity first deadline(2) - triggered by a DE Pay Annuity final deadline task completing with a Completed state. It's an Extendible External Deadline with a response date based on the triggering task's respond-by date +6M/0D final deadline offset 12M/0D.
DE Pay Annuity final deadline - triggered by either the DE Pay Annuity first deadline or DE Pay Annuity first deadline(2) task completed with Missed. It's a Hard External Deadline with a response date of the triggering task's respond-by date +6M/0D
All three DE tasks have the "one the last day of the month" flag set. I have similar sets of three tasks for other countries, with offsets or original triggers based on the national law.
If anyone has a better way of doing this, I'd love to hear it..
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@jonah-soundhound-com You're correct--I'd forgotten that. Since we just have a generic annuity task instead of country-specific ones, we always docket off the annuity deadline provided by our foreign associates.
There's probably a way to do what you're after, but it would involve a recursive transient event that would retrigger itself in one year intervals from the filing date until just after it passes the issue date, at which point you'd have another task that would trigger off of the recursive one--that one would be your annuity task.
I don't know how to make the recursive transient task stop after it passes the issue date, however, so that's kind of a dealbreaker for now. If you explore this, make the test tasks be internal deadlines so they don't auto-complete and trigger into infinity.
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@cscholz-wavsip-com Thank you for the detailed description. That is almost exactly what I have created.
However, if my understanding of the patent regulations of China is correct, the due date for annual maintenance fees is based on the filing date, not the issue date. What I really want is task generation to be triggered when a matter gets an issue date and calculate a response date that is the filing date + N years where N is the number of years between the filing date and the issue date, rounded up.
I don't think that's possible with the current Tasks module. I'm hopeful that AppColl will provide some way of creating that kind of complex task scheduling in their new way of generating recurring tasks.
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You should be able to do this--we do something similar, but generically for foreign annuities (as opposed to CN-specific ones):
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Set up the <CN Annuity Due> task to have a RespondBy date that uses the later of 12 months from issue date OR 12 months from triggering task RespondBy date.
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Set up the triggering for it to have two alternative triggers:
a) When a CN application gets an issue date (or the issue date changes, if you want to be more conservative) OR
b) When a <CN Annuity Due> task completes while the status field in the matter does not include "Expired." If you want, you can tweak this to be "when a <CN Annuity Due> task completes with a "Completed" or "Missed" state--that way you can close the task out with "Abandoned" if you are letting it go and it won't generate the next deadline. <CN Annuity Due> would be whatever you decide to call this task (you're actually recursively triggering it based on itself). NOTE: You may get an extra <CN Annuity Due> task at the end of the patent term that dockets before expiration but for date after it is expired. There's probably a way to deal with this, but I haven't devoted brain power to figuring it out at this time.
I also recommend setting up a <CN Annuity Due - Grace Period> task that triggers whenever the <CN Annuity Due> task completes with a "Missed" status. It would be set to have a RespondBy of 18 months from the TriggeringTask Reference Date. If you set up the <CN Annuity Due> task to auto-close with "Missed," then AppColl should, if you miss an annuity payment, auto-docket both the next annuity deadline AND the final deadline for the current annuity deadline.
Disclaimer: While I think that the above will work as desired, you should, if you attempt the above, test it thoroughly to make sure that it behaves as expected. I make no warranties about whether the above information is correct and assume no responsibility for any damages or liabilities that you may incur if you act on the above information/advice.
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Thanks for the posting...we are working on a way to generate recurring tasks that will likely be available later this year
