Paralegal / Legal Operations Analyst, Intellectual Property
JOB DESCRIPTION
Paralegal / Legal Operations Analyst, Intellectual Property
Location: Raleigh, NC or Beaverton, OR- hybrid schedule
This is a high-impact opportunity for someone who wants to help shape how a modern IP function operates. Ralliant’s IP team protects the innovation that drives our business, and this role sits at the intersection of intellectual property, legal operations, data, technology, and continuous improvement. We are looking for someone who is proactive, takes ownership, notices when something is not working, and has the initiative to fix it or help make it better. You will help keep patent and trademark work moving, strengthen outside legal provider coordination, support disciplined forecasting, accruals, and budget management, and turn IP and spend data into clear Power BI dashboards leaders can use. You will also help document standard work, improve repeatable processes, and expand practical automation and responsible AI-enabled workflows, including opportunities to create AI agents that make legal work faster, clearer, and more scalable.
What you’ll do
IP prosecution & portfolio support
- Coordinate trademark portfolio activities, including searches, filing support, prosecution tracking, registrations, renewals, and related portfolio maintenance.
- Coordinate invention disclosures, provisional filings, nonprovisional applications, and foreign prosecution in partnership with in-house counsel and outside firms.
- Track critical dates, filings, and outside counsel actions; confirm completion of key milestones and proactively surface timing, cost, or process risks.
- Support novelty, freedom-to-operate, and landscape search workflows by coordinating with counsel, organizing results, and tracking related deadlines and decisions.
- Facilitate invention disclosure triage and working sessions; capture decisions, owners, and follow-up actions to keep stakeholders aligned.
Legal operations, systems & automation
- Develop lightweight AI agents, bots, automations, and work-management solutions using tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Azure AI, Planner, Power Automate, and SharePoint to reduce manual work, improve visibility, and scale repeatable legal operations processes.
- Administer, optimize, and support adoption of core IP and legal operations systems.
- Maintain structured intake lists, matter queues, and documentation so requests, attachments, decisions, and actions are complete, current, and auditable.
- Proactively identify gaps, friction points, data-quality issues, and broken or inefficient processes; recommend and implement practical fixes that improve quality, speed, visibility, and user experience.
Vendor management, invoicing & budget support
- Help manage and track IP budgets on a monthly and annual basis, including spend forecasts, accrual inputs, budget-to-actual reporting, variance explanations, and leadership-ready budget visibility.
- Serve as day-to-day coordinator for outside counsel and service providers, including clean PO/statement of work setup, invoice follow-up, on-time payment support, and regular provider touchpoints to improve forecasting, accrual accuracy, and budget discipline.
- Track IP operating spend across tools, providers, and matters, including CPI, WebTMS, Novagraaf/Clarivate, PatSnap, outside counsel, annuity providers, and other IP vendors.
- Partner with outside legal providers to obtain timely matter-level estimates, forecast updates, accrual information, and explanations for material changes in expected spend.
- Document and improve standardized invoice intake, review, approval, and payment-support processes using Legal Tracker and related systems.
Analytics & reporting
- Create, maintain, and continuously improve Power BI dashboards for IP portfolio, spend, operational, and KPI reporting, ensuring stakeholders have clear, reliable, and actionable visibility.
- Own and manage the data used in Power BI dashboards, including data intake, cleansing, validation, refresh processes, source documentation, and quality controls across IP, finance, and legal operations systems.
- Connect IP assets to products, business metrics, spend, and portfolio priorities to support ROI analysis and informed decision-making.
- Produce recurring dashboards and reports for filing activity, spend versus budget, annuity exposure, cycle times, aging, and operational performance; help drive follow-up actions with the IP team.
Cross functional collaboration
- Collaborate with engineers, product leaders, Finance/AP, and operating-company stakeholders to reduce friction, improve visibility, and keep IP work moving efficiently.
What you’ll bring
Must-have qualifications
- Minimum 7 years of experience in an IP paralegal, IP operations, or legal operations role supporting patent and trademark portfolios; in-house experience preferred.
- Experience supporting trademark searches, clearance workflows, filing decisions, prosecution, renewals, and portfolio maintenance.
- Hands-on familiarity with IP systems and data, ideally including CPI, WebTMS, PatSnap, Questel, and annuity providers such as Clarivate/Novagraaf.
- Experience coordinating outside counsel, novelty/FTO work, matter documentation, deadlines, and follow-up actions.
- Proficiency with Microsoft 365, including Excel, SharePoint, Teams, Power BI, Planner, and Power Automate, with demonstrated ability to build dashboards, manage reporting datasets, and create simple flows, trackers, and data-driven legal operations tools.
- Comfort working with Finance/AP, outside counsel, and legal service providers on POs, invoice exceptions, vendor onboarding, accruals, spend forecasts, budget tracking, and variance management.
- Willingness to create practical AI agents and AI-enabled workflows; demonstrated experience building AI agents, bots, or related workflow tools is strongly preferred.
- Proactive ownership mindset with a demonstrated ability to identify issues, fix what needs fixing, document improvements, and drive continuous improvement without waiting to be asked.
- Clear, concise communication and the ability to drive alignment across legal, engineering, product, and finance.
Nice to have
- Paralegal certificate and/or IP-specific accreditation.
- Experience with open-source software governance and license request workflows.
- Prior work consolidating multi-opco IP, finance, or operational data and presenting insights for leadership through Power BI or similar reporting tools.
- Experience creating practical AI agents, bots, or AI-enabled workflow tools that improve legal, operational, or reporting processes.
Success in 6–12 months looks like
- Automation and AI wins: at least two manual processes replaced by simple, documented automations or practical AI agents in tools such as Copilot, Azure AI, Planner, Power Automate, or SharePoint.
- Outside counsel cost discipline: measurable reduction or avoidance of outside counsel spend, particularly for trademark-related work, through improved workflows, forecasting, and provider management.
- Continuous improvement: Ralliant Business System tools are applied to simplify work, improve quality, and reduce rework across core IP and legal operations processes.
- Proactive problem solving: recurring pain points, data gaps, workflow issues, and process breakdowns are identified early, fixed thoughtfully, and converted into better standard work.
- Standard work created and documented: repeatable processes for key IP, budget, reporting, data-management, and automation workflows are documented, easy to follow, and adopted by the team.
- On time, no surprises docket: deadline adherence and audit-ready records across matters.
- Cleaner AP flow & budget predictability: invoices processed within SLA; outside legal provider forecasts and accruals collected on time; budget vs. actuals tracked monthly with clear variance explanations and corrective actions.
- Actionable portfolio visibility: Power BI dashboards linking assets to products, margins, spend, cycle times, and priorities are maintained, trusted, and used in IP reviews.
- Reliable reporting data: dashboard source data is documented, refreshed, quality-checked, and managed so leaders can rely on the information for portfolio and budget decisions.
Tools you’ll use here
CPI (docketing), Claim Master, WebTMS, PatSnap, Questel, Novagraaf/Clarivate annuities, Microsoft 365 (Teams, SharePoint, Excel, Power BI, Planner, Power Automate), Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Azure and Azure AI, Legal Tracker, and the Ralliant Business System.
How we work
We operate as a collaborative Law & Compliance team focused on enabling the business, improving how work gets done, and raising issues early so the right stakeholders can solve them quickly. We value people who take initiative, fix problems at the source, document what they learn, and look for practical ways to make
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ABOUT US
Ralliant Corporation Overview
Ralliant, originally part of Fortive, now stands as a bold, independent public company driving innovation at the forefront of precision technology. With a global footprint and a legacy of excellence, we empower engineers to bring next-generation breakthroughs to life — faster, smarter, and more reliably. Our high-performance instruments, sensors, and subsystems fuel mission-critical advancements across industries, enabling real-world impact where it matters most. At Ralliant we’re building the future, together with those driven to push boundaries, solve complex problems, and leave a lasting mark on the world.
