Annual Trademark Portfolio Audit: A Founder's Checklist

A Bengaluru D2C founder opened her inbox in March to find a copycat listing built on her hero brand. She reached for her registration certificate — and discovered the renewal had lapsed five months earlier. The mark was limping through its grace period, the copycat seemed to know it, and what should have been a one-week takedown became a six-month scramble.

Trademark portfolios rot quietly. Marks lapse, product lines drift away from the classes you filed, licences go unrecorded, and dead registrations soak up renewal fees. None of it announces itself until an enforcement moment or a due-diligence call exposes it.

One structured audit a year catches all of it. Here are the six checks, in the order that surfaces the most expensive problems first.

Check 1: The renewal calendar

Under Section 25 of the Trade Marks Act 1999, a registration lasts 10 years and renews indefinitely in 10-year blocks on Form TM-R. You can file the renewal up to one year before expiry. Miss the date and you get a six-month grace period with a surcharge; miss that and you are into restoration territory, which runs up to twelve months after expiry and leaves your rights murky exactly when you might need them.

The audit action: list every mark, every class, every expiry date, and set reminders at twelve months and six months out. If anything in the portfolio expires in the next year, start the trademark renewal now — there is no advantage in waiting and a lawsuit’s worth of downside in forgetting.

A missed renewal turns a routine form into a fight for your own name.

Check 2: Use it or risk losing it

Registration without use is a wasting asset. Under Section 47, a registered trademark becomes vulnerable to removal if it has not been genuinely used for a continuous period of five years, measured up to three months before someone applies for its removal. Competitors blocked by your registration are precisely the people motivated to file that application.

For each mark, confirm actual commercial use in each registered class over the past year, and bank the evidence: dated invoices, packaging, advertising, marketplace listings, screenshots with visible dates. Store it centrally — hunting for five-year-old proof during a cancellation action is miserable work.

For marks you are not using but want to keep, make a conscious decision: plan genuine use, or accept that the registration is defensible only until someone attacks it.

Check 3: Coverage gaps vs what you sell now

Businesses drift; registrations do not. You filed Class 25 for apparel in 2021. Since then you launched a fragrance line (Class 3), a mobile app (Class 9) and marketplace retail operations (Class 35) — and none of them is covered.

Map your current products and your 18-month roadmap against the 45 Nice classes. Where you find gaps, file: the government fee is ₹4,500 per class for individuals, DPIIT-registered startups and MSMEs, and ₹9,000 per class for other companies — small money against the cost of discovering a squatter in your new category. A trademark class finder speeds up the mapping, and fresh trademark registration in the gap classes closes them.

Your trademark protects what you filed, not what you built since.

Check 4: Dead weight — registrations you no longer need

The reverse problem is just as common: registrations for sub-brands you sunset in 2023, packaging variants nobody uses, and defensive filings whose logic nobody remembers. Each one costs renewal fees every decade and management attention every year, while sitting exposed to the same non-use attacks as any other unused mark.

For every mark that no longer maps to a live product, choose one of three moves: renew it anyway because it has genuine defensive or heritage value; let it lapse and bank the savings; or assign it — a dormant mark that is dead weight to you can be a real asset to someone else, and selling it recovers cash.

Check 5: The watch service and your enforcement log

A registration blocks nothing by itself. The Trade Marks Journal publishes newly accepted applications every week, and you have exactly 4 months from publication to oppose a conflicting mark. Miss the window and you are left fighting a registered mark later through rectification or litigation — slower and far more expensive.

The audit questions: Is a trademark watch service actually running on every core mark? Did last year’s watch alerts get reviewed and acted on, or did they die in an inbox? Are oppositions that were threatened actually filed? Is there a single log of cease-and-desist letters sent, responses received and marketplace takedowns completed?

An enforcement log is not bureaucracy. It is the story of your vigilance, and courts weigh vigilance when you seek urgent relief.

The journal publishes every threat to your brand. Someone has to be reading it.

Check 6: Licence and recordal hygiene

Finally, make the register match reality. Are current licensees and franchisees recorded as registered users on Form TM-U, and are terminated ones cancelled? Are past assignments recorded, or is a mark you acquired still showing the seller’s name? Is the proprietor’s name and address current after every corporate change?

Each fix is a routine filing today. Left alone, these gaps compound: an acquirer’s diligence team treats every mismatch as a price reduction, and an opponent in litigation treats it as an argument. If the portfolio has grown beyond a founder’s spreadsheet, a professional IP audit covering trademarks, copyrights and contracts in one sweep is the upgrade.

A portfolio audit is one afternoon a year. Every problem it catches is measured in lakhs.

Put the audit on the calendar for the same month every year — many founders tie it to financial-year close. Renewals first, use evidence second, coverage third, dead weight fourth, watch fifth, recordals sixth. The brands that survive a decade are the ones somebody checked on, every year, on purpose.