Private Enterprise

Standardizing Intellectual Property management

Unifiying disconnected brand experiences across the brand portfolio

Pilot Emerging Tech

Standardize Digital Portfolio

Expand Product Offerings

Client

Abdul Latif Jameel

Completed

December 30, 2023

Standardizing Intellectual Property management

The Challenge

Abdul Latif Jameel, a diversified global enterprise operating across 30+ countries, faced a growing challenge in managing its complex and expanding intellectual property portfolio. Trademarks, domain names, licensed media assets, and digital brand materials were tracked in silos using spreadsheets, emails, and regional vendors. This fragmented setup led to missed renewal deadlines, duplicated asset purchases, and unnecessary manual effort across legal, brand, and finance teams. Collaboration with external counsel was primarily email-driven, making the process slow, error-prone, and difficult to audit. More critically, there was no centralized view for leadership to monitor brand exposure, IP spend, or governance compliance. With over 11,000 employees globally and hundreds of assets in circulation, ALJ needed a solution that could unify IP workflows and decision-making—without disrupting local team autonomy or established processes.

Our Solution

To address this, ALJ partnered with LemonHQ to design and implement a modern, experience-led Intellectual Property Management (IPM) platform. The engagement began with on-site design sprints involving stakeholders from Legal, Finance, Brand, and IT, mapping over 40 user journeys and compliance checkpoints. A clickable prototype was developed and tested with 28 key users, 92% of whom preferred it to the existing tools. In just 12 weeks, a minimum viable product (MVP) was launched using a modular, micro-frontend architecture integrated with Azure Active Directory for secure, role-based access.

The new platform consolidated IP tracking, approvals, renewals, and collaboration into a single interface. It featured a real-time dashboard for global trademark and domain status, guided workflows for managing IP lifecycles, and an asset library that automatically fetched media from Getty, Adobe Stock, iStock, and others. Smart duplicate detection flagged redundant purchases, while the finance cockpit calculated ICANN fees and multi-currency renewals and integrated with SAP and NetSuite for downstream processes. A collaboration layer enabled comments, @mentions, and audit-ready trails, with external portals for counsel and agency partners. Each user—whether a legal lead, brand manager, finance analyst, or external vendor—saw only what they needed through customized role permissions. The product continued to scale through six-week release cycles, with new modules for financial workflows, calendar views, and asset ingestion added seamlessly.

Results

10× faster IP decision-making, reducing turnaround time from ~10 days to <1 day
–60 administrative hours per month, freeing teams from manual tracking and email chains
20% reduction in duplicate stock-asset spend, thanks to centralized rights and duplicate detection
100% on-time renewals, up from 71%, eliminating lapses and compliance risks
5× increase in asset reusability, enabling brand assets to support more campaigns and regions
Improved governance and audit-readiness, with a single-source cockpit for global visibility
Stronger employee enablement, with over 11,000 users gaining self-service access to key brand tools