U.S. Patent 9990504 was awarded to Northern Trust Corporation on June 05, 2018 and is entitled “Systems and methods for generating and maintaining immutable digital meeting records within distributed network nodes.” The first named inventor is Anthony Stevens of Herefordshire, . The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

Embodiments disclosed herein provide systems and methods for digital meeting management within a blockchain. Before a meeting, a computer may generate a digital meeting record containing a plurality of data fields and linked to various smart contracts to capture meeting activities. During the meeting, a first smart contract may authenticate and record attendees in the digital meeting record based on biometric information received from the attendees’ devices. Furthermore, a second smart contract may capture in the digital meeting record, meeting actions of each attendee, including date, time, and location associated with the meeting actions. After the meeting, a third smart contract may autopopulate post meeting documentation. After review by the attendees, the third smart contract may store a hash of the documentation to the digital meeting record and store the documentation in a repository. Once appended to the blockchain, the digital meeting record becomes an immutable record of the meeting. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on December 18, 2017  as U.S. Patent Application 15/846059 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 9990504. The primary examiner was Harunur Rashid.

Northern Trust Corporation, who is the original assignee of this patent, has at least 5 total granted patents in the United States as of the date of this article. This blockchain patent has been cited 12 times by other U.S. patents according to our law firm research, and can be considered an innovative patent in the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

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