FG Propriedade Intelectual saves over 300 hours by automating IP case management with Zoho Flow

About the company

FG Propriedade Intelectual is an intellectual property law firm based in São Paulo, Brazil, bringing together lawyers, engineers, and IP consultants. It handles trademark and patent registration, industrial design protection, and strategic IP asset management, alongside enforcement work spanning civil and criminal proceedings across every level of the Brazilian court system. Because IP infringement carries criminal penalties in Brazil, much of the firm's work runs against official procedural deadlines it can't afford to miss.

Automating case creation from official IP notices

Every week the firm receives official notices relating to its clients' trademark and patent filings. Each of them carries a standardized code which helps the team plan their next action.

The team used to create a matching project and add the required information to it by hand, which meant taking information already entered in one platform and re-entering it in another. Beyond that wasted time, manual re-entry carried the constant risk of putting wrong or misplaced information into the fields, which in IP work can mean acting on the wrong filing. A single notice took at least 15 minutes to recreate as a project.

"The team spent time moving data from one app to another, and oftentimes they missed or added incorrect data. Such human errors could impact our customers' cases at court, as the team could be working off the wrong data."

Pedro Chrispim, Digital Operations,FG Propriedade Intelectual

Then they built a flow integrating Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, and Zoho WorkDrive in Zoho Flow. Now, when a notice is added to Zoho CRM, based on the code, records enter Zoho Flow. Zoho Flow then checks whether the entry needs a follow-up or is just a deal, or if it needs to create a project or an in-depth analysis task for the team.

If needed, the flow then creates a deal in Zoho CRM, a corresponding project in Zoho Projects, and a Zoho WorkDrive folder named after the project and linked back to it, so every document relating to that filing has a home from the moment the notice arrives. Values and discounts are also pre-set on the new deal, so nobody fills those fields in by hand. Earlier, this process took at least 15 minutes. Now it happens in a few seconds.

Managing procedural deadlines across every filing

For the firm, missing a deadline on a trademark opposition or patent response isn't just an administrative error—it can cost a client their rights.

"Missing a deadline in legal work costs you the client and your reputation."

Pedro Chrispim, Digital Operations,FG Propriedade Intelectual

Deadlines in Brazil run from the moment a movement is published, so the firm subscribes to a court-publication monitoring service that watches every proceeding it's tracking. That service is connected directly to Zoho CRM, and each new publication lands as a record in a dedicated module carrying the deadline the team has to meet. Before this, the team controlled those deadlines through email.

Zoho Flow picks up from that record and drives the case through analysis and then review. It creates an activity on the related project so a lawyer knows a new deadline has arrived. The lawyer analyzes the case in Zoho CRM, and when they finish, they click a button that sends it to review. That fires a second activity for the reviewer, who checks the deadline in CRM and approves it.

What happens on approval depends on what the case actually requires. One of the possible outcomes is a providência the firm calls "nada a fazer,"—nothing to do. In that case, the flow updates Zoho CRM to record that no action is needed, and stops there. If action is required, the flow uses the firm's project naming convention to find the related project in Zoho Projects, then checks the progress milestone and files deadline work under already exists cases. If it does, the flow adds the tasks to it. If not, it creates the milestone first and then adds them, so a second deadline on the same case never produces a duplicate milestone.

For each deadline, it then creates three things: an elaboration task for the work itself, a deadline task dated to the day the deadline falls, and a calendar event for that date. This is how the firm separates its internal managerial deadline from the official court deadline. Finally the flow writes back to Zoho CRM confirming which tasks were created, and from that point the work is managed entirely in Zoho Projects. Every deadline the firm is accountable for is held in the system rather than in someone's memory or a spreadsheet.

Validating case types and handling criminal follow-on actions

Automating record creation can raise a specific risk: A case filed under the wrong type creates the wrong project, and that mistake then gets buried in the system.

When the firm's criminal cases arrive, they land in Zoho Desk as a new ticket. The team reviews each case, and when they're ready, they click a button on the ticket to fire the actions downstream.

The form offers two case types:

• A boletim de ocorrência is an initial report, where someone is reporting a crime and the police are not formally involved yet.
• An inquérito policial is a police investigation, which carries the number the police issue when a crime is formally reported. Both are criminal matters, and each opens a different kind of project.

Unfortunately, clients kept selecting the wrong one. Several times a client marked a case as a boletimde ocorrência but also filled in the investigation number field. So the flow carries a second check on top of the first. If the case is marked as an initial report but the investigation number field has a value, the flow treats it as an investigation regardless of what was selected, on the reasoning that a client holding a police number has already been to the police. Pedro describes it as client-error protection, built so a misfiled case never becomes the wrong project.

Once the type is settled, the flow opens the project in Zoho Projects, creates a deal in Zoho CRM, creates a record in a related CRM module, writes everything it has just created back onto the a Zoho Desk ticket as confirmation, creates or copies a Zoho WorkDrive folder depending on the case type, renames it, and updates the project with the folder link.

They also have a case escalation workflow. When a prosecutor brings charges against a police investigation, Brazilian procedure opens a separate ação pen one case can have two different projects can projects on one case. Rebuilding that second project used to be entirely manual—staff copied the investigation project by hand, re-entered the same information under a new name, applied a different layout and a different project template, and recreated the tasks.

Now the team sets the project status to denúncia and archives it, and that triggers the flow. It duplicates the project, carries the information across from the original, applies the ação penal layout and template, and names it with the client name, the case type, and the case number. It creates a fresh WorkDrive folder for the prosecution, renames it, and links it to the project. It also writes the original project's ID into a related-project field on the new one, so the archived investigation can always be found by searching that ID. Nothing recorded on the original is lost, and both threads of the same case stay retrievable.

Securing the internal information repository

The firm also runs an OTP-based authenticator for a secure internal information repository. A web page holds the repository, access is limited to authorized individuals, and the backend registers each person's email address. Zoho Flow sends the OTP for authentication and posts an alert into Zoho Cliq whenever someone accesses the system, which the firm keeps for compliance.

Benefits and ROI

"With Zoho Flow, we've saved over 300 hours over the past year. We're also never missing deadlines, which means we're not losing clients. Our procedural deadlines are now controlled by a system instead of someone having to remember them. In intellectual property work, that's a difference that matters."

Pedro Chrispim, Digital Operations, FG Propriedade Intelectual

Zoho Flow has changed how FG Propriedade Intelectual carries its administrative tasks. Work that used to take the team hours each day—rebuilding projects and moving information between applications by hand—now happens on its own. This gives the team more time to work on their cases, ensuring they're always offering the best client experience possible.