Let’s start out with the obvious point: It is almost certain that your law firm does not have enough malpractice insurance to cover a multi-billion dollar loss. Firing the employee who cost you billions won’t bring the money back. The point is that there are some mistakes you just can’t recover from — and one of them is allowing your intellectual property rights to expire.
Patents aren’t set-and-forget assets. After securing a patent, owners must pay maintenance fees (also called renewal fees) to keep it in force. Miss a payment, and the patent can lapse into the public domain, meaning anyone can use the once-protected invention freely. It sounds straightforward, yet history is riddled with costly blunders where a small unpaid fee or a missed deadline led to the loss of patents worth millions or even billions. In this post, we’ll explore why tracking and paying maintenance fees on time is absolutely essential – highlighting real-world cautionary tales like the recent Ozempic patent fiasco in Canada – and how you can avoid a similar fate.
Let’s start with my own story, luckily one that didn’t cause much financial harm. I disclosed an invention to my patent lawyer back in the age of dinosaurs (to hear my kids describe the 1990’s) and postal-mail patent filings. We filed the provisional patent application on April 15, and prepared the utility application for filing on April 15 of the following year. We sent drafts back and forth with counsel, and everything was ready to file. The lawyer did whatever patent lawyers did with paper filings (printing, formatting, etc.), and sent it via courier to the US Post Office at LAX (which was at that time open 24/7). Once we got that postmark for April 15, we’d be timely on file and get the priority date of our provisional. Great! We’re done! Except … no.
It turns out that April 15 is tax day, and there was a line at the post office (the courier told us) that went on for blocks. He got in line around 6 pm and got the application mailed a couple of minutes after midnight. The result? It was postmarked, and therefore date, April 16. We missed the one year deadline by minutes. But missing by minutes was no different than missing it by years: We lost the priority date. As an aside, lesson learned: Never wait until the due date to file. You never know when a glitch will hit.
From Wallet‑Sized Mistake to Wallet‑Busting Catastrophe
Ozempic racked up roughly C$2.5 billion in Canadian sales last year alone—Canada’s single‑biggest drug spend. Analysts peg the coming generic wave (set to rush in the moment data exclusivity ends in January 2026) at a 50‑80 % price drop, with Novo’s market share likely collapsing just as fast. Even a conservative model—60 % erosion on flat sales for 2026‑27—shreds C$3 billion off the top line. That’s the cost of forgetting to feed the parking meter—only the meter sat outside a vault of gold.
This is the most dramatic recent examples of why the minutiae is critical. Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical giant that definitely should have known better, permanently forfeited its Canadian patent on semaglutide – the active ingredient in best selling diabetes/weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy – simply by failing to pay a routine annual maintenance fee. In 2019, the company missed a payment of about C$450 (including late penalties) and even let the one-year grace period lapse, after previously hesitating over a mere C$250 fee the year before. Under Canadian law, once the grace period passed the patent cannot be revived, and that’s exactly what happened.
I could write pages on this, but it would do a disservice by complicating it. The story is a simple one: Patent law is unforgiving, and a tiny error can break the bank. Luckily, there are law firms and companies that manage these kinds of payments. Unluckily for Novo, they didn’t take advantage of those services.
IBM’s “Voluntary” Patent Bonfire—Proof the Fire Spreads
Think this is a pharma‑only headache? Not even close. Over the past decade IBM has let thousands of U.S. patents expire simply by skipping the first 3½‑year fee, a strategy that slashed maintenance costs but also surrendered assets competitors now mine for free. Imagine torching an R‑and‑D skyscraper every quarter because the light bill felt steep.
The One‑Inventor Tragedy: When “Check Your Spam Folder” Isn’t a Defense
At the other end of the food chain, the Taillefer case shows how a single inventors’ patent evaporated after routine fee reminders landed in a junk‑mail folder. Canada’s Federal Court made it painfully clear: “due care” demands robust backup systems—no second chances. One mis‑routed email and a decade of personal sweat equity slid into the public domain.
It Isn’t Just Patents
Domain names and trademarks are two other examples of rights that you can lose just by forgetting to pay a fee.
Deadlines Don’t Discriminate — or Forgive
We could add more war stories: The Medicines Company’s 24‑hour late filing that nearly sent Angiomax over the patent cliff and triggered a malpractice suit against two blue‑chip law firms. But the through‑line is always the same: maintenance, docketing, and extension dates are tiny fuses attached to colossal powder kegs. Ignore the spark and boom—your patent is a fancy wall decoration.
So How Do We Make Sure It Never Happens to Us?
- Redundant Calendaring – Triple‑entry the dates: your personal calendar, an IP management platform, and your attorney’s system. Think of it as the three‑lock rule for your digital safe.
- Pay Early, Treat Grace as Triage – Grace periods are morphine, not vitamins. Use them only when the patient is bleeding, never as your regular diet. That said, sometimes cash flow is king and you need to take those grace periods and pay the surcharge.
- Regular Portfolio Fire Drills – Review every asset, ask “Does this patent still earn its keep?” and either pay happily or abandon intentionally. Surprise is the only true enemy.
- Update Contact Info and Spam Filters Like Your Life Depends on It – Because your IP life does. One stale email address wrecked Taillefer’s patent.
- Professional Watchdogs – Good annuity services cost less than a single office‑action response; great ones cost less than losing Ozempic‑level money. If you can afford it. Let’s be real: Startups need to pinch pennies, so this is a tension that must be resolved with eyes wide open. Do we take the risk that we forget to pay the fee, or do we pay a premium to a fee payment company?
Failure is Not Fatal: It is the Courage to Continue that Counts (quote often attributed to Churchill)
Yes, a missed date can feel like the end of the world, but remember Edison’s advice that every failure merely points out “another way that won’t work.” The Ozempic fiasco is a horror story only if we file it under “unavoidable.” Re‑file it under “tuition,” and we walk away with a priceless degree in Operational Vigilance—no student‑loan payments required. I mean, to be clear it sucks for Novo, and had it happened in the US market, it might have thrown them into a real financial crisis. But it is also a mistake that they won’t make again (if they do make it again, then they kind of deserve to go under).
Let’s turn that multi-billion-dollar loss over a $450 fee into an enduring lesson. If you can’t afford a law firm or annuity payments firm (with enough malpractice coverage to make good on a mistake) to manage your payments, go ahead and tape bright‑red index cards with upcoming fee dates above your monitor, get a physical calendar, pay your friends to remind you — because genius isn’t scared of looking low‑tech. You’re innovative — feel free to comment below about how you manage dates.