Intellectual Property

Deadlines That Forfeit Rights

Most compliance failures come with a fine and a path forward. Miss an annual report, pay the penalty, reinstate. IP is different.

Miss a patent maintenance fee and the patent lapses. Miss a trademark Declaration of Use and the registration gets cancelled. Let a domain expire and someone else registers it within hours. The consequence isn’t a late fee — it’s permanent loss of rights. Lextree’s Intellectual Property module tracks the deadlines and documentation that determine whether you keep what you’ve earned. Not prosecution, not portfolio strategy — just the compliance obligations attached to your assets.

Patents, Marks, Domains

The USPTO requires patent maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after issue. Each deadline has a six-month payment window followed by a six-month surcharge period. Miss both and the patent lapses. Lextree tracks these from the issue date with reminders at six months, 90 days, and 30 days. Foreign patents with annual schedules use custom deadlines.

US trademarks require a Section 8 Declaration of Use between years five and six after registration — a filing many organizations overlook because it falls outside the standard ten-year cycle. Missing it means cancellation. Section 8 and Section 9 sit in separate records. International marks under the Madrid Protocol use custom event dates. Domain reminders go out at 90, 60, 30, and 7 days before every expiration, regardless of auto-renew status. Even with auto-renew enabled, domains expire when cards fail or renewal notices go to unmonitored inboxes.

Portfolio by Entity

Most organizations track IP across law firm databases, registrar portals, and spreadsheets. The law firm knows the patents it prosecuted, marketing knows the trademarks, IT knows the domains. Nobody has the complete picture.

Lextree provides one registry of IP assets organized by the entity that owns them. Each asset type (patents, trademarks, copyrights, domain names) gets its own structured record — registration numbers, issue dates, jurisdictions, and renewal deadlines. Each asset carries an assignment chain: the ownership transfer history from original assignee to current owner. Patent assignments include USPTO reel and frame numbers. Trademark assignments capture whether goodwill was transferred, a legal requirement for validity. When due diligence questions ownership, the chain of title is already in place. A company ten years old might have domains at GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, and a legacy registrar from an acquisition. Lextree consolidates them into one registry regardless of registrar.

Teams still consolidating that portfolio by hand can start with our free intellectual property register template and migrate the registry into Lextree once the asset count outgrows a single sheet.

Trade Secret Protection

Trade secret protection differs from every other form of IP compliance. No registration, no renewal, no government office. Protection depends on proving two things: you identified the information as a trade secret, and you took reasonable steps to keep it confidential.

If you can’t prove both in court, the protection doesn’t exist — regardless of the information’s value. When a former employee takes a pricing algorithm to a competitor, the first question in litigation is whether the company treated that information as a trade secret. A contemporaneous record answers that more persuasively than testimony from memory. The Trade Secret Registry captures what each secret is, why it has economic value, and who has authorized access. Protective measures get their own documentation: physical security, technical controls, NDAs, need-to-know policies.

IP in Context

A patent owned by a subsidiary is only as secure as that subsidiary’s legal standing. If the entity’s registration lapses, the ownership chain is clouded.

Every IP asset anchors to a legal entity. View an entity and see its patents, trademarks, copyrights, and domains alongside registrations, tax filings, insurance policies, and contracts. IP licensing agreements can live here or in Contracts — organizations with dedicated IP teams keep licenses alongside the portfolio; legal teams that manage agreements centrally prefer Contracts. Vendor NDAs that protect trade secrets live in Vendors; the trade secrets themselves live here.