Data Security at PATOffice - Your most valuable asset deserves the strongest protection.

Imagine you've spent three years developing a technology that will change your market. Your team has invested hundreds of hours in research, experiments, and patent filings. Then you find out that a competitor, just months before your launch, presents a solution that looks unsettlingly familiar.

Not a coincidence. Not parallel development. A data breach.

This scenario isn't paranoia. It happens. And it happens far more often than most companies are willing to admit publicly.

IP is the most valuable asset many companies own, and often the least protected.

In manufacturing companies, technology firms, pharmaceutical businesses, wherever innovation is the actual competitive advantage, intellectual property is frequently worth more than any machine, building, or product on the shelf. Patents, invention disclosures, pending applications, technical assessments: this is the foundation on which future market positions are built.

And yet, in many organizations, this domain is treated digitally like any ordinary workspace. Documents in generic cloud storage. Comments buried in email threads. Research results in tools whose privacy policies hardly anyone has actually read.

Strategic financial decisions sit behind firewalls and access controls. M&A processes run in sealed data rooms. But patent work, the very basis of future market leadership, often runs alongside all of this, without the same level of care.

That needs to change.

Why patent work demands particularly strong protection.

Patents are sensitive by nature, and in a very specific way.

An unpublished patent application describes in detail what your company plans to do next. It reveals the technological direction you're thinking in, the problems you're solving, and how. Whoever has this information has a head start, long before the patent ever becomes public.

On top of that, IP work is inherently collaborative. Patent engineers, external counsel, R&D teams, sometimes external reviewers, many people work on the same documents. Every access point is a potential risk. Every unsecured interface, an open door.

And then there's AI. More and more teams are using AI tools to analyze patents, accelerate research, or prepare filings. That's the right move. But it raises a new set of questions: Where does that data go? Is it used to train models? Who has access?

How we think about security at PATOffice.

PATOffice was built by europatent, a company with roots in the IP space going back to the 1950s. Decades of experience that taught us what trust really means in this context. Our customers share their most sensitive information with us. That has always been the case, and it has always been a responsibility we take seriously.

When we developed PATOffice, security wasn't a feature we added at the end. It was a foundational decision.

In practice, that means:

No AI model training with your data.

Whatever you enter, analyze, or comment on in PATOffice stays with you. It is never used to train AI models, not by us, not by third parties.

Closed AI system.

Our AI features work exclusively with patent documents and predefined prompts. Internal comments, tags, user information, none of it is passed to the AI model.

Enterprise-grade encryption.

All data is encrypted in transit and at rest using TLS 1.3 and AES-256.

Hosted on AWS (EU).

Your data is stored and processed exclusively on AWS data centers within the European Union. It never leaves the EU.

Full control.

SSO via Microsoft Entra ID, role-based permissions, comprehensive activity logging, and data deletion on request.

SOC 2 Type II

Certification in progress.

GDPR

Compliant.

‍EU AI Act

Compliant.

Trust isn't a given — it has to be earned.

I regularly speak with IP managers who tell me: "We know we need to lock this down, we just don't know where to start." That's an honest answer. And it shows that this topic still doesn't get the priority it deserves in many organizations.

My recommendation: ask your tools the same questions you'd ask a new employee who's being given access to your most sensitive information. Who can access my data? What happens to it? Where is it stored? Who is liable if something goes wrong?

If a tool can't answer those questions clearly, that's an answer in itself.

At PATOffice, we can answer them. And we're happy to.

‍

Lukas Kappelsberger CEO, PATOffice | europatent

Questions about data security and compliance? Reach out directly or take a look at our Security page.