Creating and managing a patent information group in a global environment

The article describes the key aspects of setting up and managing a global team of patent information scientists (GLIST) to work primarily with patent attorneys in a multinational pharmaceutical company. The main features identified for this team included:•the flexibility to deal with searches efficiently, worldwide, within the team;•close interaction between the information scientists and the attorneys, in partnership;•managers of the team also carry out some searches themselves;•sufficient language expertise within the team to carry out most translations in-house;•good training and mentoring procedures, allied to a strong team ethic;•a final product of each search which is a value-added search report, delivered in a timely manner, using a standardized GLIST-branded template.