You may notice a large list of inventor contacts records appearing after your initial set of matters are imported. If your patent matters have been populated with data from Patent Center or EspaceNet, AppColl automatically creates contact records for each inventor. These contacts records only include a name and a role of inventor. It is possible to end up with 100s or 1000s of inventor contacts.

AppColl does not attempt to determine if two inventors are one in the same person if their name spelling are slightly different. For example, one application may list Jonathan T Smith as an inventor. In a second application, the name may be listed as Jon Terry Smith. As such, AppColl will create two contacts records that may actually be one in the same person.

Therefore, it is likely that some level of removing duplicates and/or merging contact records is necessary. Click here for detailed instructions on this process.