What is patent coordination?
Provisional to standard patent — the disclosure file organised for the registered patent attorney the law requires.
An Australian patent runs on two live filing types since the innovation patent was abolished for new applications on 25 August 2021: a provisional application, which is a $100 placeholder that locks in a priority date without being examined, and a standard patent, the substantive examined right that can run up to 20 years from the filing date of the complete application. If a business plan or a sales deck still mentions an AU innovation patent as a fast, cheap option, that option no longer exists for new filings — the abolition is a hard cutoff, not a phase-out, and existing pre-2021 innovation patents only continue under transitional rules for the people who already hold them.
The provisional-to-standard clock is the part founders miss most often. Filing the $100 provisional buys exactly 12 months to file the complete (standard) application claiming priority back to that date — miss the window and the priority date is lost, which can matter enormously if a competitor files or the invention becomes public in the meantime. From there, examination has to be separately requested, an examiner searches prior art and can issue adverse reports on novelty, inventive step or clarity, and only once those are resolved does the application get accepted, advertised, and (absent opposition) granted. IP Australia's own numbers put the realistic path from complete filing to grant at two to four years or more, depending on the examination queue and how many rounds of objections come back.
Who does what
Patent prosecution in Australia is restricted to registered patent attorneys (Patents Act s.201); CapEasy introduces one and project-manages the file around them.
Who does what
| Your CapEasy team | Patent coordination, the reconciliations and reporting behind it, and the questions list that keeps it honest. |
| Your registered BAS or tax agent | Everything that carries a licence in Australia — rendered exactly as written: work out what goes on your bas, or advise you on it — under tasa 2009 that requires registration we do not hold. |
| You | One conversation with one named person, and the decisions that are genuinely yours. |
Patent coordination in Australia
Section 201 makes unregistered patent work a criminal offence, not a compliance risk
Acting as, or holding out as, a patent attorney or an agent for obtaining a patent in Australia without being on the Register of Patent Attorneys is a criminal offence under s.201 of the Patents Act 1990. The current penalty is 30 penalty units for an individual or partnership member and 150 penalty units for a body corporate — at the Crimes Act 1914 s.4AA penalty-unit value of $364 (effective 1 July 2026), that is roughly A$10,920 for an individual and A$54,600 for a corporate entity. Penalty units are indexed periodically, so the exact figure moves over time, but the structure — a criminal offence, not a fine you can shrug off as a cost of doing business — does not. CapEasy does not touch specification drafting, claims, or prosecution at any stage, including the $100 provisional filing, and only ever operates as the referral and project-management layer around a registered patent attorney.
The innovation patent is gone — 25 August 2021 was the last day to file a new one
Australia used to offer a second, lower-threshold patent type — the innovation patent — that was faster to obtain and cheaper to enforce than a standard patent, aimed at incremental improvements rather than major breakthroughs. New filings closed permanently on 25 August 2021. A pre-existing innovation patent filed before that date can still be examined, certified and enforced under transitional arrangements, but nobody can create a new one. Any pitch, template or comparison that still lists the innovation patent as a live, cheaper alternative to a standard patent is describing a product that no longer exists for a new filer — the only routes open today are provisional (a priority-date placeholder) and standard (the full examined patent).
The provisional application buys exactly 12 months, not a rolling extension
A provisional application costs $100 to file, is not examined, and exists purely to lock in a priority date while the invention or the business case is still being worked out. The complete (standard) application claiming priority back to that provisional must be filed within 12 months — there is no automatic extension of that window. Miss it, and the priority date is lost; a later filing starts a fresh clock from whatever date it actually lands, which can hand a competitor or a public disclosure the earlier claim. Tracking that 12-month deadline against the invention's actual commercial timeline, rather than leaving it to memory, is one of the concrete things CapEasy's coordination role does.
A granted standard patent is enforceable immediately — unlike the design-registration quirk
Once a standard patent clears examination, is accepted, advertised, and (absent a successful opposition) granted, it is immediately enforceable for up to 20 years from the filing date of the complete application, subject to paying annual renewal (maintenance) fees from the fourth anniversary onward. That is a meaningfully different shape from AU design rights, where registration and certification are two separate steps and an uncertified design cannot be enforced — a founder moving between the two IP types inside the same portfolio needs to understand that a granted patent is a right they can act on the day it grants, with no separate certification step still owed.
What your registered BAS or tax agent receives from us
- An invention disclosure pack: a plain-language description of what the invention does, how it works, and what problem it solves — written for an attorney to turn into a technical specification, not written as marketing copy.
- Any drawings, diagrams, prototypes or product photos the founder already has, organised and labelled to match the disclosure so the attorney can see what's being claimed.
- A prior-art summary of anything the founder already knows about — competing products, existing patents they're aware of, publications — so the attorney's own search starts from an honest baseline rather than a blank slate.
- A commercial-context brief: target markets, launch timing, whether the invention is already in public use or disclosed anywhere, and why the priority date matters commercially right now.
- A shortlist of registered Australian (or Trans-Tasman) patent attorneys matched to the invention's technical field, with their Register of Patent Attorneys status confirmed before introduction.
- A tracked deadline calendar covering the 12-month provisional-to-standard filing window, the examination-request deadline once the complete application is filed, and any adverse-report response windows the attorney's practice flags back to us.
