A consumer brand with roots in the 1870s faced the inverse of a startup's clearance problem: too many marks, too much history, too many portfolios inherited through acquisition, and a clearance process that had not been seriously rebuilt in more than a decade. The team did not need a tool; it needed a redesign.
A clearance process built for a smaller company
When the brand was last reorganised, its trademark portfolio had perhaps four hundred live marks across a handful of jurisdictions. By the time of this engagement, that number had climbed past two thousand four hundred across forty-plus jurisdictions, partly through organic growth and partly through three significant acquisitions.
The clearance process, however, was essentially the same one designed when the portfolio was a fifth of its current size. A new product mark would be circulated by email, manually screened against the in-house register, and then sent to outside counsel for a fuller search. The work got done, but slowly, and at a cost that had begun to attract attention from finance.
The deepest problem was less visible. Because every mark went through roughly the same path, the in-house team was spending the bulk of its time on low-risk clearance, which is exactly the work least dependent on their judgement. The high-stakes calls — the genuinely ambiguous marks — were getting the same hours as the obvious ones.
What we changed first
Rather than start with software, we started with a triage protocol. Every new mark would be classified on intake into one of three lanes: clear (no meaningful conflict signal in the in-house register or the priority jurisdictions), ambiguous (one or more conflict signals, but resolvable internally), or escalated (genuinely contested or strategically sensitive).
Lane one — the clear marks — would skip directly to registration prep with no analyst involvement, on the explicit understanding that the team would accept a small false-negative rate in exchange for speed. Lane two would land on a senior analyst's desk with a structured brief. Only lane three would reach external counsel, and only with a decision memo attached so counsel was not rebuilding context from scratch.
Unifying the historical record
The acquired portfolios were the next problem. Three sets of legacy data, three different naming conventions, three different ways of recording goods and services classifications, and overlapping renewal calendars maintained by three different teams. From a clearance perspective, these were effectively three different registers, which meant the in-house team could not see conflicts across them without manual cross-checking.
We migrated all three into a single portfolio view, with a normalised goods-and-services taxonomy mapped back to original filings. The migration itself was unglamorous and took roughly four months. Once it was done, the clearance team could finally answer a question they had not been able to answer reliably before: do we already own a mark that conflicts with the one we are about to file?
A surprising secondary benefit was renewal hygiene. The unified view exposed a small number of marks that had quietly fallen out of force during the acquisitions, and a larger number where the team had been paying renewal fees on marks that no longer protected anything the business cared about.
Outcomes the team can defend in a budget meeting
Average time from new-mark intake to filing dropped by roughly half across the portfolio, with the largest gains in lane one — the clear marks that had previously waited behind everything else in the queue.
External counsel spend fell by a low double-digit percentage in the first full year, and the composition of that spend shifted noticeably toward prosecution and opposition work, which is where the team had wanted external time to go all along.
Internal capacity reopened. The clearance team, which had effectively stopped accepting strategic projects because of routine workload, ran two portfolio rationalisation reviews in the second half of the year and quietly retired several hundred marks that no longer served the business.
What we got wrong on the way
Two things are worth admitting. The triage thresholds for lane one were too generous in the first quarter, and a small number of marks slipped through that should have been escalated. We tightened the rules and added a quarterly sample audit; the false-negative rate has been within tolerance since.
We also underestimated how culturally hard the change would be for the team. The old process, however slow, was a source of professional craft, and asking experienced analysts to stop touching low-risk work felt to some like a demotion. The redesign worked because leadership reframed the change as moving them toward higher-value work, not away from familiar work — and was patient enough to let that reframing sink in.
Implications for other heritage portfolios
Most heritage trademark portfolios we see have the same shape: a slow accumulation of marks, jurisdictions, and acquired data, layered on a process that was right for an earlier era of the business. The instinct in those situations is to add tooling. The actual fix is almost always a redesign of the work itself, with tooling chosen afterwards to support the redesigned process.
Done well, that redesign tends to pay back twice: once in measurable cost and cycle-time improvements, and once in the form of a clearance team that wants to stay because the work has become interesting again.
Modernising a heritage trademark program is rarely a software problem and almost always a workflow problem. The brands that get the most out of a redesign are the ones willing to change how the work is shaped before changing what it runs on.
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