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IP attorney retainer: patent prosecution, trademark portfolio, and IP licensing advisory on monthly retainer

July 24, 2026 · ~18 min read

A medical device startup receives a final rejection from the USPTO on its lead patent application. The examiner has rejected all 17 claims as obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103, citing a combination of four prior art references. The combination, the examiner argues, teaches every element of every claim. The startup’s CEO reads the office action and calls the IP attorney with a straightforward question: “How long until we get the patent?”

The IP attorney knows the answer is not straightforward. A final rejection is not a denial of the patent — it is a procedural stage that requires either a response arguing against the rejection, a request for continued examination (RCE) that buys another prosecution round, an appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), or some combination. But the right strategy depends on an analysis the CEO has never seen: whether the combination of prior art references actually teaches the claim elements the examiner says it teaches, whether the startup’s invention is genuinely novel relative to the combination, whether the independent claims can be amended to overcome the rejection without surrendering the scope that makes the patent commercially valuable, and whether the prosecution history to date has created estoppel that would limit the patent’s enforceability even if the claims are allowed in amended form. Getting from the CEO’s question to a prosecution strategy recommendation requires reading the four prior art references in full, mapping each claim element against the prior art disclosure, identifying the elements the combination teaches and the elements it does not, and evaluating the strength of the examiner’s reasoning for the elements where the mapping is arguable. That analysis is 4 to 8 hours of work that produces, as its visible output, a one-page strategy memo recommending “argue-only response focused on element C of the independent claim.”

This is the specific dynamic that makes IP attorney retainer hours systematically undervalued: the visible output of intellectual property work is a patent application, a trademark registration, a license agreement, or a one-page strategy memo. The analytical work behind those outputs — the prior art landscape analysis, the clearance search opinion, the claim scope evaluation, the royalty rate benchmarking — is invisible. On a monthly retainer engagement, tracking and communicating that invisible advisory work is as important as the prosecution filings it informs, because the prosecution strategy is what the client is actually paying for, and the strategy without the analysis behind it is a recommendation without a record.

Patent prosecution advisory

Patent prosecution advisory is the IP attorney retainer’s core ongoing function for technology clients. The prosecution of a patent application is not a linear process: from initial filing to grant (or abandonment) typically takes 2 to 5 years and involves multiple rounds of examination, rejection, response, re-examination, and sometimes appeal. The IP attorney on retainer manages the prosecution docket continuously — monitoring deadlines, evaluating rejections, recommending responses, drafting amendments, and maintaining the strategic coherence of the patent portfolio across multiple pending applications at various prosecution stages simultaneously.

Office action response strategy

An office action is the USPTO examiner’s written communication either rejecting one or more claims or indicating allowance. Responding to a rejection is the most analytically intensive routine task in patent prosecution: the attorney must understand the examiner’s rejections, evaluate their validity by reading the cited prior art, decide between arguing against the rejection (preserving full claim scope), amending the claims (narrowing scope to distinguish the prior art), or both, and draft the response in a way that creates a prosecution history that supports the client’s enforcement strategy down the line.

The prosecution history is the public record of everything said during prosecution — every argument made, every claim amendment filed, every examiner statement. In enforcement litigation, the accused infringer will read the prosecution history to determine whether the patentee’s arguments and amendments constitute prosecution history estoppel that limits the doctrine of equivalents scope of the claims. A response that overcomes the rejection by argument but characterizes the invention in narrow terms can create unnecessary scope limitations. A response that overcomes the rejection by amending the claims can surrender literal scope that the original claims covered. An argue-only response that fails to overcome the rejection wastes a prosecution round and extends the timeline. The office action response strategy is the decision about how to allocate the prosecution resources and scope for the maximum commercial value of the resulting patent.

In one office action response advisory engagement, the IP attorney received a non-final rejection citing two prior art patents — Alvarez et al. and Chen et al. — in an obviousness combination. The examiner argued that Alvarez taught elements A, B, and C of claim 1, Chen taught element D, and a person having ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine them to arrive at the claimed invention. The attorney’s prior art analysis found that while Alvarez clearly taught elements A and B, the examiner’s reading of element C was based on a passage in Alvarez describing an embodiment that was explicitly marked as optional and that required a specific configuration the client’s product used but that the Alvarez disclosure characterized as one of several possible configurations — not the configuration the examiner was mapping to element C. The argument was therefore that the examiner’s mapping was based on a mischaracterization of the Alvarez disclosure, and that when Alvarez was properly read, the combination did not teach element C. The argue-only response preserved claim scope without amendment and overcame the rejection. The analysis that identified the Alvarez reading problem took 3.5 hours and produced two paragraphs of argument in the office action response.

Claim amendment advisory

When an argue-only response is not likely to succeed — either because the prior art mapping is accurate or because the examiner has issued a final rejection that forecloses new arguments without an RCE — claim amendment becomes the prosecution path. Claim amendment requires deciding which limitations to add to the independent claims, in what scope, and how to draft the amended language to be interpreted narrowly enough to distinguish the prior art but broadly enough to cover the commercial products the client wants to protect.

The commercial scope preservation challenge is where claim amendment advisory is most valuable. In one amendment advisory engagement, a software client’s independent claim had been rejected over a combination of prior art that taught three of the four elements of the claim. The fourth element — a specific data synchronization timing mechanism — was not clearly taught by the prior art combination, but the examiner had made a prima facie obviousness argument that a person of skill would have been motivated to include the element based on general knowledge in the field. The amendment options were: (a) add a highly specific limitation on the timing mechanism that would definitively distinguish the prior art but would also read narrowly on the client’s own product variants; (b) add a moderately specific limitation that distinguished the prior art with some prosecution risk but preserved coverage of multiple product variants; or (c) file a continuation application with the original broad independent claim while amending the parent application’s claims, preserving the opportunity for broader claim allowance through a different prosecution path. The advisory analysis evaluated each option against the client’s current product architecture, the competitor landscape, and the likelihood of the PTAB agreeing with the examiner’s prima facie obviousness finding on appeal. The recommendation was option (b) with specific claim language and a continuation filing strategy. That recommendation was 6 hours of analysis presented in a two-page memo.

Continuation and divisional strategy

Continuation and divisional applications are the prosecution tools for building a patent portfolio around a core invention rather than relying on a single patent. A continuation application claims the same priority date as the parent application and can be filed at any time while the parent is pending, allowing the applicant to pursue different claim scopes (broader or narrower, differently structured) in parallel prosecution tracks. A divisional application is required (or elected) when the USPTO issues a restriction requirement finding that the application claims two or more distinct inventions — the applicant can pursue each invention in a separate application without losing patent term.

Continuation strategy is the portfolio architecture function that most significantly determines the long-term defensive and offensive value of the client’s patent portfolio. A startup that files one application, prosecutes it to grant, and considers the portfolio complete has a single patent covering a single claim set fixed at the time of grant. A startup that files the original application, monitors the competitive landscape during prosecution, and files targeted continuations to cover competitor product features as they emerge has a portfolio that grows in commercial relevance as the market develops. The continuation strategy requires tracking pending applications, monitoring competitor product announcements and patent filings, and evaluating whether the parent application’s disclosure supports claim sets that would read on emerging competitor products — an ongoing advisory task that produces no deliverable in months when the competitive landscape does not warrant new continuation filings, but represents significant strategic value over the lifecycle of the portfolio.

Trademark portfolio advisory

Trademark portfolio advisory covers the ongoing management of a company’s brand protection strategy through federal trademark registration, international filing, watch services, and maintenance. A trademark registration is not a one-time event — it requires active maintenance (Section 8 declarations, renewals), ongoing monitoring for infringing uses and confusingly similar applications by third parties, and strategic management of the international registration portfolio as the business expands into new markets.

Clearance search interpretation

A trademark clearance search is the pre-filing investigation that identifies potentially conflicting marks before an application is filed. Clearing a mark means reviewing the search results — which include federal registrations, pending applications, state registrations, and common law uses identified through business databases, domain searches, and internet searches — and rendering a likelihood of confusion analysis for each identified potentially conflicting mark. The analysis requires applying the DuPont factors: similarity of the marks in appearance, sound, and connotation; similarity of the goods or services; channels of trade; sophistication of buyers; strength of the cited marks; actual confusion evidence; and other factors.

Clearance search interpretation is the advisory task where IP attorneys most frequently see clients underestimate the hours involved. A search report for a new brand mark in a crowded technology category might return 40 to 80 potentially conflicting marks. Evaluating each conflicting mark under the DuPont factors — reading the registration, reviewing the identified goods and services, comparing the mark appearance and sound, assessing the commercial strength of the conflicting mark owner — takes 15 to 30 minutes per mark for the marks that clearly do not conflict (which can often be dismissed quickly) and 45 to 90 minutes per mark for the marks that present a genuine likelihood of confusion question requiring a full DuPont analysis. In one clearance search advisory engagement, a 68-mark search report took 11 hours to evaluate: 55 marks were dismissed in 10 to 15 minutes each (7.5 hours); 8 marks required a full DuPont analysis (5.5 hours); and 5 marks were borderline cases that the attorney discussed with the client (1.5 hours of client communication). The output was a 12-page clearance opinion letter. The client saw the opinion letter; the 11 hours of mark-by-mark analysis that produced it were not visible in the document.

Specimen of use evaluation

A trademark application requires either a specimen showing current use of the mark in commerce (for use-based applications) or a bona fide intent to use the mark (for intent-to-use applications). Specimen of use evaluation is the advisory task of reviewing the client’s proposed specimens before filing to determine whether they demonstrate the mark being used in connection with the goods or services in the manner the USPTO requires. Specimen problems are one of the most common causes of Office Actions in trademark prosecution: the USPTO issues an Office Action requiring a substitute specimen if the submitted specimen does not show the mark associated with the identified goods or services in a way that demonstrates trademark use.

For goods, the USPTO requires a specimen showing the mark on the product itself, on product packaging, or on a label affixed to the product. A screenshot of a website displaying the mark without any reference to the product being purchased does not qualify as a specimen for goods. For services, the USPTO accepts websites, brochures, or advertising that shows the mark used in connection with the service offering, but the specimen must show the mark in a context that clearly advertises the services rather than simply displaying the mark. A logo image without surrounding service context does not qualify. In one specimen advisory engagement, a client submitted a product photography image showing the packaging of a hardware device with the mark printed on the box. The IP attorney’s specimen review identified that the mark on the box appeared in a font size 40% smaller than the brand name on the same packaging, raising a question of whether the submitted specimen was using the mark as a trademark or merely as a product description. The advisory recommendation was to submit an additional specimen showing the mark on the product’s companion mobile app (which showed the mark prominently as the app name) to reduce the specimen risk, and to document the client’s intentional use of the mark as a trademark in the application file in case the USPTO raised a specimen issue.

International class selection and Madrid Protocol filing

International class selection is the trademark filing decision that most directly determines the commercial scope of the trademark protection received and the USPTO examination risk at filing. Trademark registrations in the US and internationally are organized by Nice Classification: 45 international classes covering goods (Classes 1 through 34) and services (Classes 35 through 45). The scope of protection received from a trademark registration is defined by the goods and services identified in the registration, not by the class alone. Filing in Class 42 (scientific and technological services) with an identification that says “software as a service (SaaS) featuring software for business management” is not the same protection as filing with an identification that specifies the actual service offered.

In one class selection advisory engagement, a software company was expanding from its core B2B productivity application into a marketplace feature that connected buyers and sellers of professional services. The company’s existing trademark registration covered Class 42 software services. The marketplace feature raised the question of whether Class 35 (advertising and business management services, including online marketplaces) was required for the expanded product, and whether the existing Class 42 registration covered or could be extended to cover the marketplace functionality. The advisory analysis determined that the marketplace functionality — where the company facilitated transactions between third parties rather than providing software tools for the client’s own use — was a Class 35 service that was not covered by the Class 42 registration. The recommendation was to file a new application in Class 35 with an identification describing the marketplace services, and to document the relationship between the Class 42 software platform and the Class 35 marketplace in the prosecution file in case a related company challenge was raised. The analysis took 3 hours; the recommendation prevented a gap in trademark protection that would have been significantly more expensive to address after the marketplace feature launched at scale.

Trade secret protection advisory

Trade secret protection advisory is the IP attorney retainer function that covers the legal and operational design of the measures that qualify confidential business information for trade secret protection. Under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and state trade secret laws, information is only legally protectable as a trade secret if it derives economic value from not being generally known and the holder takes reasonable measures to maintain its secrecy. The “reasonable measures” requirement is where most trade secret litigation is won or lost, and ensuring those measures are in place and documented is an ongoing advisory task.

Information barrier design

An information barrier is the collection of organizational, technical, and contractual measures that prevent confidential information from being accessed by people who do not need it and from leaking to competitors through inadvertent disclosure, employee mobility, or vendor relationships. The IP attorney’s advisory role in information barrier design is identifying the gaps between the client’s current confidentiality practices and the standard that would be required to defend a trade secret claim in litigation — because in trade secret litigation, the defendant’s primary defense is that the alleged trade secret was not actually protected by reasonable measures, and therefore does not qualify as a trade secret.

In one information barrier advisory engagement, a technology company that relied on a proprietary machine learning model as its core competitive advantage was asked to audit the measures in place to protect the model as a trade secret. The audit found: the model weights and training data were stored in a shared cloud storage bucket accessible to all engineering employees, regardless of their work function; the model architecture documentation was included in the company’s onboarding materials shared with all new hires, including sales engineers and marketing staff who had no technical need for the architecture details; departing employees were not provided with a written list of specific confidential information they were obligated to protect; and vendor agreements with two data labeling contractors did not include confidentiality provisions covering the training data. Each of these gaps would be exploitable by a defendant in trade secret litigation: the lack of access controls shows the company did not restrict access to people who needed it; the onboarding disclosure shows the company affirmatively shared the information without a confidentiality agreement; the lack of departure documentation makes it difficult to prove the departing employee knew they were taking a trade secret; and the vendor agreement gap creates an argument that the training data was disclosed without restriction. The advisory produced a remediation roadmap: access control implementation, revised onboarding materials, updated offboarding protocol, and vendor agreement amendments. The audit was 8 hours; the remediation roadmap was 4 hours.

Contractor NDA coverage gap identification

Contractor NDA review is an ongoing trade secret advisory task for companies that work with external contractors, consultants, freelancers, or offshore development teams who access confidential business information. The risk profile is specific: unlike employees (who are covered by employment agreements and implied duties of confidentiality in most jurisdictions), contractors and freelancers have only the obligations explicitly created by the agreement they signed. If the NDA does not cover a specific category of information, the contractor is not legally obligated to treat it as confidential under that agreement.

In one contractor NDA advisory engagement, the IP attorney reviewed the NDAs for 12 active development contractors at a software company. The review found three categories of coverage gaps. First, four contractors were operating under an NDA template from 2019 that predated the company’s development of its current core technology: the NDA described the confidential information in general terms (“business information, technical information, and customer data”) but did not specifically enumerate the proprietary algorithms that were now the company’s primary trade secrets, creating a coverage ambiguity that a contractor’s attorney could exploit in litigation. Second, three contractors’ NDAs did not include an invention assignment clause, meaning that any developments created by those contractors during their engagement were arguably owned by the contractors, not the company — a problem distinct from the confidentiality gap but equally significant for the IP portfolio. Third, two contractors operating in a jurisdiction with mandatory non-disclosure law requirements had signed the company’s standard US-form NDA without jurisdiction-specific modifications, creating a question of enforceability in the local jurisdiction. The advisory produced a contractor agreement remediation plan, including updated NDA language, an invention assignment addendum, and jurisdiction-specific modifications for the two international contractors.

Copyright registration advisory

Copyright registration advisory covers the strategy for registering copyrights in software, creative works, and other copyrightable content, and for enforcing those rights through DMCA takedowns and litigation when infringement is identified. Copyright attaches automatically upon creation in the US — registration is not required for copyright to exist. But registration before infringement (or within 3 months of first publication) is required to be eligible for statutory damages and attorney’s fees in infringement litigation, which are the remedies that make copyright enforcement economically viable against most infringers.

Software copyright registration strategy

Software copyright registration for commercial software products involves strategic decisions about how to register the software to maximize protection while managing the disclosure requirements of the deposit process. The US Copyright Office requires deposit of source code when software is registered — either paper printouts of the first 25 and last 25 pages, or an electronic deposit under the special relief procedures for unpublished or published software that contains trade secrets. The trade secret special relief procedure allows the applicant to block out or replace the trade secret portions of the deposit, which is critical for software companies that do not want to deposit their core proprietary algorithms in the Copyright Office’s public records.

In one software copyright advisory engagement, a SaaS company had been operating for 4 years without registering copyright in its core platform software. The company had received a cease-and-desist letter from a competitor alleging that the company’s product UI copied the competitor’s proprietary interface. The IP attorney’s advisory addressed two simultaneous needs: registering the company’s own software copyrights to establish prior creation dates and to create the registration prerequisite for statutory damages in any future infringement claim; and advising on the response to the competitor’s cease-and-desist. The registration strategy identified that the company should register copyrights in multiple registrable works: the software source code (using trade secret special relief to protect the proprietary algorithm portions of the deposit), the UI screen designs (which are separately registrable as visual art), and the user documentation (which is registrable as a literary work). Registering the UI designs as visual art was particularly important for the cease-and-desist response: it would establish the company’s copyright in its own interface design as prior to the competitor’s alleged design date, which was the factual foundation for the counterargument that the competitor, not the company, was the alleged infringer. The registration strategy analysis was 4 hours; the registration applications for three separate works were separate project scope engagements.

DMCA takedown strategy

DMCA takedown advisory covers the use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 512 notice-and-takedown procedure to remove infringing content from online platforms. The procedure requires the copyright holder to send a written takedown notice to the platform’s designated DMCA agent identifying the infringed work, the infringing URL, and the complainant’s information. The platform is required to expeditiously remove the identified content or lose its safe harbor from copyright liability.

DMCA takedown strategy advisory is where the attorney’s work most closely resembles triage: the IP attorney reviews the infringing content, assesses the strength of the copyright claim, drafts the takedown notice, and monitors the platform’s response and any counter-notice filed by the content poster. In one DMCA takedown advisory engagement, a software documentation company had discovered that a competitor was systematically copying substantial portions of its technical tutorials and reposting them under the competitor’s brand name on a developer community platform. The attorney’s advisory identified 23 pages of documentation that met the threshold for copyright registration and DMCA takedown, drafted a batch takedown notice covering all 23 URLs with the registered copyright citation for each, and advised on the counter-notice risk: if the competitor filed counter-notices asserting a fair use defense, the platform would restore the content after 10 business days unless the copyright holder filed a federal lawsuit. The advisory included a litigation risk assessment: whether the counter-notice scenario warranted pre-emptive litigation filing, or whether the cost-benefit of litigation outweighed the value of the takedown. The triage analysis and drafting was 6 hours; the DMCA notice filing was a separate task.

IP licensing advisory

IP licensing advisory covers the structuring, drafting, and negotiation of intellectual property license agreements, including patent licenses, trademark licenses, software licenses, and technology transfer agreements. The IP licensing attorney on retainer advises on the scope and terms of licenses in both inbound situations (the company is licensing in technology from a third party) and outbound situations (the company is licensing its own IP to a third party), and on the IP provisions in the M&A, partnership, and technology agreements that the company’s general counsel negotiates.

Royalty rate benchmarking

Royalty rate benchmarking is the analytical foundation for license negotiations: determining the appropriate royalty rate for the intellectual property being licensed by reference to rates charged in comparable transactions. The benchmark informs both the opening negotiating position and the reservation price — the minimum rate below which the licensor is better off refusing the license than granting it.

Royalty rate benchmarking requires identifying comparable license transactions, which is methodologically challenging because most IP license terms are confidential and only a fraction of license agreements are publicly reported through SEC disclosures, settlement agreements in litigation, or published FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) rate determinations. The comparable transaction analysis evaluates the licensed IP’s contribution to the overall product value (does the licensed patent cover a core feature or a peripheral one?), the exclusivity terms of the proposed license (exclusive licenses command higher royalties than non-exclusive licenses), the market size and expected sales volume under the license (which affects the royalty base and the absolute dollar value of a percentage point of royalty rate), and the strength and defensibility of the IP being licensed (a well-prosecuted patent with broad claims in a technology area with few design-arounds commands a different rate than a narrow patent with obvious workarounds).

In one royalty rate advisory engagement, the IP attorney was advising a startup on the terms of an inbound license for a foundational signal processing patent that the startup needed to incorporate into its hardware product. The patent holder was proposing a 3.5% running royalty on net sales. The attorney’s benchmarking analysis reviewed comparable signal processing patent licenses reported in public sources, analyzed the patent’s contribution to the product’s overall functionality (the patented method was used in one of seven signal processing steps in the product; the other six steps were unpatented and contributed comparably to the product’s performance), and applied the apportionment principle: a running royalty on net sales should reflect the licensed IP’s proportionate contribution to the product’s value. The analysis supported a counter-proposal in the 0.4% to 0.8% range with a per-unit cap, which the startup presented with the underlying apportionment analysis. The benchmark analysis was 5 hours; the negotiation support was separate retainer time.

License scope and field-of-use restriction design

License scope advisory covers the definition of the rights granted under the license: the geographic scope, the field of use, the term, the exclusivity, and the sublicensing rights. Each of these dimensions represents a tradeoff between the licensor’s interest in retaining rights and deriving value from future licensing and the licensee’s interest in obtaining the broadest rights necessary for its business. Getting the scope right requires understanding the licensee’s current business, its likely expansion paths, and the licensor’s strategic interests in maintaining flexibility for future licensing to other parties.

Field-of-use restrictions are the license scope tool most frequently underspecified in technology licenses. A field-of-use restriction limits the licensee’s use of the licensed technology to a defined application area — for example, a patent license restricted to “use in consumer electronics products” would not permit the licensee to use the licensed technology in medical devices or industrial equipment, even if the patent covers technologies applicable to those markets. Field-of-use restrictions allow the licensor to segment the market and license the same IP to multiple parties in different fields, but they require precise drafting: a field restriction that is ambiguous at its boundaries creates disputes when the licensee expands into adjacent markets.

In one license scope advisory engagement, a semiconductor IP company was licensing its memory controller technology to a consumer electronics manufacturer. The license draft restricted the licensee’s use to “consumer electronics products.” The IP attorney’s advisory identified two scope ambiguities in that field-of-use definition. First, the licensee was beginning to sell its consumer electronics products to fleet operators (commercial trucking companies) who were deploying the consumer electronics as display systems in commercial vehicles — was a consumer electronics product sold to a commercial fleet operator still a “consumer electronics product” under the license? Second, the licensee was developing a home networking device that used the memory controller technology — was a home networking product a “consumer electronics product?” The advisory recommended defining “consumer electronics products” by reference to a specific list of product categories (smartphones, tablets, laptop computers, smart TVs, digital cameras, wearable devices, home audio and video equipment) and excluding commercial and industrial applications explicitly, rather than relying on the unmodified category term to resolve future scope disputes.

Frequently asked questions

Tracking IP attorney retainer hours with HourTab

IP attorneys and patent counsel on monthly retainer face the most acute form of the invisible-work billing problem in professional services. The visible output of patent prosecution is a patent application filed or an office action response submitted. The visible output of trademark work is a trademark registration certificate. The visible output of a trade secret advisory engagement is a gap analysis memo. What is not visible in any of those outputs is the prior art landscape analysis that shaped the claim strategy, the 68-mark clearance search evaluation that produced the two-paragraph clearance opinion, the contractor NDA audit that identified the undocumented coverage gap, and the royalty rate benchmarking analysis that anchored the counter-proposal.

The specific billing challenge for IP retainers is that prosecution timelines are long and milestone deliverables are sparse. A patent application filed in January may not receive its first office action until October. During those 9 months, the IP attorney is monitoring the docket, reviewing competitor filings, evaluating new invention disclosures, conducting prior art research to support continuation strategy, reviewing trademark watch reports, and advising on IP provisions in the client’s partnership agreements. All of that work is happening continuously; the visible deliverables arrive in batches, on the USPTO’s schedule rather than the client’s monthly billing cycle. When the invoice arrives for a month with no USPTO filings, the client who has not seen the work log has no visibility into what the retainer hours contained.

HourTab is built for exactly this billing challenge. Import your time-tracker CSV, and HourTab generates a public retainer-hours URL that your client can bookmark. The URL shows a live view of hours logged against the monthly retainer allocation, with the work log entries visible in chronological order. The client does not need a login or a client portal to see where the retainer hours stand. When the invoice arrives for a prosecution-quiet month, the client has already seen the prior art monitoring session, the continuation strategy analysis, the trademark watch report review, and the trade secret contractor audit. The hours are not a surprise; they are a record of the IP advisory engagement the client has been following in real time.

The Free plan handles one active retainer: a public share URL, CSV import, and a work log with a progress bar showing hours consumed against the monthly allocation. The Solo plan at $9 per month supports up to 10 active retainers with a custom URL slug, no HourTab branding, CSV export, and email-a-summary for month-end client reporting. The Studio plan at $19 per month supports unlimited retainers, a branded subdomain, two team seats for firms where a senior attorney and associate share a client retainer, per-client headers, and rollover rules for engagements where unused hours carry forward into the following month.

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