Darts-ip: Data for all
Success in any area is often a combination of three things: talent, hard work and perseverance. For software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Darts-ip, all three were needed to grow a pioneering idea from a handful of people to a 300-strong organisation in just 13 years. All three, plus one essential ingredient: data.
The talent came in the form of two groups from very different industries. The service they wanted to offer, to make legal research as easy as possible, came from trademark lawyer and Darts-ip founder Jean-Jo Evrard.
While working in Brussels and Paris for law firm NautaDutilh, Evrard was frustrated. The problem, as he saw it, was that despite harmonised European trademark laws, there was no centralised source of trademark law decisions.
He decided to create one, drawing in all the trademark cases from courts across the EU.
But as a lawyer with an idea, he could get only so far. When he teamed up with an IT and software engineering team, Evrard’s plan exploded into life.
“I said the project should be much more ambitious,” remembers Evrard van Zuylen, one of the non-legal team at that meeting and now one of Darts-ip’s co-managing directors.
“Jean-Jo was very good from a legal perspective but not that savvy in IT matters. Things that he thought were unfeasible, we’d say ‘that’s easy’. And other things he thought were easy and we’d say ‘that’s impossible’.”
Then the hard work began: the team started to create a database of trademarks in Europe. Van Zuylen recalls the painful hours spent manually scanning thousands of decisions at courts in Paris. It was time well spent, giving them a unique and reliable database—the lifeblood of SaaS platforms and Darts-ip’s crown jewels.
The young startup company then indexed the cases and wrote algorithms that allowed users to find, within seconds, answers to specific queries within the database. For example: ‘find all the cases in the EU where watches and jewellery were found to be similar’, or: ‘find all the case law regarding where one vowel in the middle of a word mark is different’.
“Our idea was: if a lawyer had a specific question, how can we answer it? That was unique,” says van Zuylen.
The company then moved to uploading patent cases, before expanding to a raft of other IP areas, including domain names, designs and models, and copyright, with unfair competition soon to be added to the roster.
Now, the company has gone global, expanding from its headquarters in Brussels to open offices around the world, including in the US, India and Hong Kong. The hours spent scanning documents have changed too—the company now uploads more than 100,000 decisions each month.
Being an outsider
Admitting he knew “very little” about IP prior to the original meeting, van Zuylen is convinced that being an outsider helped, first in the company’s creation and later in its success.
He describes how the meeting of IT people and lawyers created “an interesting clash of
ideas”. Compared to financial services or accounting, the legal industry was a late adopter of SaaS, and the IP sector’s relatively small size meant it lagged even further behind.
