A Dedicated Trademark Team Is Rarer Than You Think

For general counsel and in-house legal teams running trademarks across more than one jurisdiction.

Most companies believe they can run trademarks in-house. The benchmark data says otherwise, and it's worth being precise about what a real in-house trademark function actually costs before deciding your setup needs one.

What a dedicated trademark team actually is

INTA's In-House Practitioners Benchmarking Report is the most-cited source on this, drawn from 500+ in-house practitioners across 300+ organizations. The median organization with a dedicated in-house trademark team holds around 4,500 registered marks. The team runs about six people, roughly half attorneys, a third paralegals, the rest administrators, on a budget of $1-2 million a year.

That's the bar. A dedicated trademark team is a multi-million-dollar function sitting on top of a portfolio in the thousands of marks.

It's worth saying what that number is and isn't. It describes established teams, not the moment a company makes its first trademark hire. But it sets the scale honestly: a genuine in-house trademark capability is a large, expensive, specialized department, and the portfolio that justifies it is correspondingly large.

Below that scale, "we handle trademarks in-house" usually means something else. It means an IP manager whose real center of gravity is patents or designs, with trademarks as a secondary duty. Or it means the general counsel's team absorbing trademark operations alongside everything else legal owns. Neither is a trademark team. Both are what a trademark team's absence looks like.

Why this decides your model

Every trademark setup sits somewhere on two axes: centralized or decentralized, and flat rate or billable hour.

The decentralized model, multiple local firms instructed and coordinated from inside, is built for the organization with that INTA-scale team. The team is what makes it work. It instructs the local firms, holds the portfolio view, runs the renewal calendar, and reconciles the spend across jurisdictions and currencies. Take away the team and the model doesn't get cheaper. It gets unmanaged.

That's the quiet failure. A company with a serious but sub-thousands portfolio adopts the decentralized model, because that's what trademark work is supposed to look like, without the department the model assumes. The instructing and tracking and reconciling still has to happen. It lands on a legal team that was never staffed for it, next to everything else they own.

So the real question isn't which model looks more professional. It's whether your portfolio justifies a multi-million-dollar trademark department. For the overwhelming majority of companies, including well-resourced ones with active, growing, multi-jurisdiction portfolios, the honest answer is no. And that's exactly the company centralized is built for.

Centralized: we run it, and owning our software is why we can

For the portfolio too serious to neglect and too small to justify an INTA-scale team, we're the primary counsel. We run the whole estate, and the reason we can do that at a flat price is that we own the software underneath it.

Here is the mechanism, because it's the part that actually matters. A traditional firm's cost is lawyer and paralegal time. That's what you pay for, and it's why the meter runs, a person does the docketing, a person chases the renewal, a person assembles the portfolio view on request. We built the software that does those things, so the marginal cost of the operating layer, the tracking, the calendar, the portfolio view, the gap-flagging, is close to zero for us. That's not a feature list. It's why we can price the whole relationship as one number instead of billing the hours, and why the number lands 30-50% below traditional counsel. A firm that rents generic docketing software can't do this, because the automation isn't theirs to bend and the license cost sits inside your fee.

The legal work is unchanged. Admitted counsel does the legal work in every jurisdiction, because trademark law is jurisdictional and always will be. What owning the software changes is the expensive, mechanical layer wrapped around that legal work, which is precisely the layer a company without an INTA-scale team can't staff and shouldn't have to.

"As we expand in Europe, it is important to have a partner who stands by us and with whom we can discuss as much we want."

Anna Wallander, CEO

Decentralized: we run underneath the team you already have

If you are the organization with the team, the department, the local-firm network, the thousands of marks, you don't need a new primary counsel. You need the mechanical layer to stop consuming senior time. The same software runs there too, as self-serve modules on the Platform, underneath the setup you already have. Three make the point.

Clearance Search doesn't hand your team a data dump. Most tools stop at prior conflicting marks and leave the reading to you. Ours also screens absolute grounds, the descriptiveness, genericness, and prohibited-term problems that sink a mark even when nothing conflicts with it, across 190+ jurisdictions on licensed registry data, not scraped. The machine measures the similarity and screens the registrability. Your attorneys make the likelihood-of-confusion call, because that is a legal determination, not a score.

Trademark Watch doesn't hand your team a flood of alerts to triage. Every hit comes with the read: how close the conflict is, which of your classes it touches, and the deadline you have to act by. The serious ones escalate to an attorney in a click, in the same place the alert landed.

Legal Hub turns every signal, an office action, a renewal, a watch hit, into a tracked matter with the deadlines extracted and the documents attached, then routes it to counsel across 190+ jurisdictions when action is needed. Your team keeps the strategy, the local firms, and every legal decision. The software takes the tracking, triage, and docketing that were never a good use of a trademark attorney's hours.

A firm that owns its technology can offer this. A firm that sells only hours has no reason to build it, and a platform that isn't a law firm can't stand behind the legal judgment when your team escalates.

Where this fits

Centralized, us as primary counsel, if:

• The portfolio is active, growing, multi-jurisdiction, and nowhere near the thousands-of-marks scale that justifies a dedicated department.

• Trademark operations currently land on your legal team, or an IP manager, as a side duty.

• You want the estate run for you, with the mechanical layer handled by a system rather than headcount you can't justify.

Decentralized, us as self-serve modules on the Platform, if:

• You have the INTA-scale function already: the team, the department, the local-firm network.

• Search, watch, and matter tracking are consuming senior time better spent on judgment and strategy.

• You want your existing model to run better without replacing your counsel.

Neither, if:

• The brand isn't a strategic asset and the mark count is flat or shrinking.

• The business is winding down trademark activity. A single local firm handling renewals costs less than any model built for growth.

Where we land

We're a law firm that owns its own software, and that's what lets us serve both models. As primary counsel for the company that shouldn't build a department, one system, one flat price, sized to the portfolio, across more than 190 jurisdictions, typically 30-50% less than traditional counsel. As self-serve modules on the Platform for the company that already has the team, Clearance Search, Trademark Watch, and Legal Hub run underneath the setup you've built.

Admitted counsel does the legal work in every jurisdiction, ours or one of the 15+ local counsel firms in our network. The software does what a dedicated department does by hand, at a cost structure a department can't match.

We're a law firm, not a filing platform borrowing legal language. The system tracks the estate. The attorneys make the legal calls. Every step is on the record.