Your Trademark Spend Has No Category

For legal operations and general counsel who have been asked what trademarks cost and were not sure.

Ask most companies what they spend on trademarks each year and you get a number. Usually it is the total on the invoices from their main outside firm. Usually it is a fraction of the real figure.

That matters for four reasons. You cannot negotiate a number you do not have. You cannot forecast it. You cannot defend it in a budget round. And when somebody quotes you a saving, you have no way to check it.

This is how to find the real number, and how to make it exist by default next year.

First, it is not your filing system

INTA's 2025 survey asked 291 in-house trademark practitioners whether their budgets had changed over the previous five years. Thirty-one percent reported cuts, 25 percent increases, 35 percent no significant change. Nine percent said they did not know.

These are people whose job is trademarks. Nearly one in ten could not say whether their own budget had moved.

There is a structural reason. Accounting standards do not recognise internally generated brands as assets, so the cost of building and protecting your own marks is expensed as it is spent, into whatever caption it lands in. No standard chart of accounts has a trademark line. Neither of the two major legal department benchmarking frameworks treats trademark spend as a reportable category, and no survey we could find even asks companies whether they can produce the figure.

Your legal department may well have e-billing. Around 84 percent do in the US-weighted surveys, and adoption is lower across much of Europe. Either way the payments are captured somewhere. But nothing rolls them up as trademark, because nothing in the accounting, benchmarking or billing architecture ever asked for that total.

The wider point is worth naming. Legal operations as a discipline grew up around litigation and commercial matters. Trademark sits inside it as a minor code set rather than a category anyone manages. The number is not lost. It was never assembled.

Who needs to be in the room

This is not a solo exercise and it is not really a legal exercise. Four people, and only one of them is a lawyer.

Whoever signs off outside counsel invoices. Usually the general counsel or a senior generalist, if there is no dedicated trademark lawyer. They know what was instructed and why.

Accounts payable. The most important person in the room. They hold the general ledger and can pull payment history by vendor name even where matter coding does not exist, which it will not. Everything else depends on this.

Whoever administers renewals. If that sits in marketing, brand, or a regional subsidiary rather than legal, they are holding a cost line nobody in legal can see.

Procurement, if you have one involved. For a company your size, probably not. US survey data reported in the legal procurement literature has only 1.2 percent of legal departments saying procurement is always involved in outside counsel selection, against 81.4 percent saying never. No comparable European figure exists, and procurement involvement is more common in some European markets than in the US, so treat that as a prompt to check rather than an answer.

Where to look

Most companies count the first item here and stop.

In the legal budget, unlabelled

• Your primary outside firm's invoices. The number you probably have.

• Foreign associate and local counsel fees, often sub-invoiced through the primary firm, sometimes billed direct.

• Official fees and disbursements, on separate lines or passed through at cost.

• Currency spread and bank charges on foreign invoices.

Outside the legal budget entirely

• Clearance searches run during naming projects, commonly paid from a brand or campaign budget.

• Domain registrations and renewals, often with IT or marketing.

• Online brand protection and takedown services.

• Watch service subscriptions.

Separate vendors nobody codes to trademark

• Renewal and annuity agents, frequently a different supplier from your counsel.

• IP management or docketing software, if you license it directly.

• Translation for foreign filings and evidence.

Never counted

• Internal time. Hours spent instructing counsel, chasing status, reconciling invoices, maintaining whatever spreadsheet holds the portfolio. A day a week is a fifth of a salary and appears nowhere.

How to count it

Set the scope. Last complete twelve months, every entity in the group. Multi-entity companies lose the most here, because a subsidiary filed through its own firm and nobody consolidated.

Pull the ledger by recipient, not by category. Category coding is what lost the number, so do not trust it. Ask accounts payable for every payment in the period to: your primary firm, any other firm with attorney, advokat, IP, patent or trademark in its name, domain registrars, renewal and annuity agents, watch and brand monitoring providers, takedown services, translation agencies, and the offices themselves if you ever pay official fees directly.

Ask marketing three questions. Did we run any naming or rebrand projects, and who paid for the clearance. Who buys and renews our domains. Do we pay anyone to monitor or take down infringing listings. Finance cannot answer these, because the spend was never coded as legal.

Ask the people doing the work how long it takes. Not their manager. Three or four people who actually touch trademark work, hours per month, including invoice reconciling and status chasing. Multiply by salary plus a third.

Sort every line into four buckets.

• Legal judgment. Oppositions, disputes, contested refusals, coexistence questions, strategy, opinions. An attorney has to decide something.

• Execution. Filing, renewals, recordals, assignments. Acts that produce a legal result.

• Coordination. Instructing foreign counsel, chasing them, collating what comes back, reporting onward.

• Retrieval. Being told things you already own.

Check it three ways. Does your live mark count times a typical renewal cost roughly reconcile with what the renewal agent charged. Is there a recipient you cannot explain. Is there a jurisdiction you hold marks in that appears nowhere in the payments, because that means somebody else in the business is paying for it.

The two buckets people undercount

Coordination is billed on both sides. Your team's hours are invisible because nobody logs them. But your primary firm's coordination is on your invoice, and it does not say coordination. It says correspondence with foreign associate, or reviewing and reporting, or attending to your instructions. In a centralised arrangement with local counsel underneath, you are paying a professional rate for somebody to be the relay between you and the person doing the work.

Retrieval should not exist at all. Somebody asks whether an existing mark already covers a new product in a given market. The question goes to counsel, somebody bills time to look it up, check the specification and the classes, and report back. Three days later you have an answer about your own portfolio and you have paid professional rates for it. A few times a month across a handful of markets is a real number, and it is undetectable on an invoice because it sits in the same narratives as the substantive work.

Neither produces a legal result. Nothing gets filed, nothing gets defended, nothing gets decided. Both exist because the portfolio is spread across firms and nobody has a live view of it.

Make it countable next year

The count above is archaeology. This part is the fix, and it is the more valuable half.

The taxonomy already exists, though not where you might expect. The Uniform Task-Based Management System, maintained by the LEDES Oversight Committee, includes a dedicated trademark code set ratified close to two decades ago. TR100 covers assessment and administration. TR200 covers investigation and analysis, with sub-codes for registrability, clearance, opposition and enforcement investigation. There is also a separate IP expense code set covering translation, official fees, and renewal and maintenance fees as distinct lines from attorney time.

It is a US-originated standard and there is no European equivalent. We looked. No CCBE framework, no national bar, no EU institution has built a comparable task-code taxonomy for legal billing.

That matters less than it sounds, because task codes are a client-side requirement rather than a professional rule. Nothing stops a company in Stockholm or Amsterdam requiring them, and any firm with international clients will already know the system. You are not adopting a US regulation. You are asking for a format.

Worth knowing what your own conduct rules do and do not give you here. The CCBE model code, binding across EU and EEA bars by incorporation, requires that a lawyer's fee be fully disclosed and that you be told the amount or at least the factors behind it. That is a disclosure right. It is not an itemisation right, and no European provision we found treats IP billing as a distinct category. The granularity has to come from your own guidelines, because the professional rules will not produce it for you.

One tailwind. EU e-invoicing mandates are making invoices structured and machine-readable across the bloc, Germany phasing in from 2025 to 2028, Belgium from January 2026. That is being done for VAT compliance rather than cost transparency, so it will not categorise anything for you. But the plumbing is improving, and structured invoices are easier to require detail from.

Require what a machine can check. The evidence on outside counsel guidelines is lopsided in a useful way. Mechanical requirements get enforced, because e-billing platforms validate submitted invoices against task codes and rate cards and reject non-compliant lines before a person reads them. Relational provisions, staffing mix, budget pre-approval, be-reasonable clauses, are widely described as aspirational and dependent on the relationship.

The lesson is not that guidelines do not work. It is that only the checkable parts do.

What to require depends on how you are being charged, so decide that first.

If you are billed for inputs, hours plus associate fees plus disbursements, then the components are what you are buying and you need to see them. Put these in your guidelines:

• Task codes on every line, using the trademark set.

• Official fees, renewal fees and translation itemised separately from attorney time, using the IP expense codes.

• Currency stated on every foreign line, with the home-currency equivalent and the rate applied.

• Disbursements itemised rather than aggregated.

If you are billed a fixed all-in price, none of that applies and asking for it is asking the wrong question. You are buying an outcome at a stated number, so the composition is the firm's problem. What you need instead is scope, in writing: what the number covers, what it excludes, what happens when something falls outside it, and what happens at renewal.

The underlying test is the same either way. Can you predict what you will pay, and do you know why it is what it is. Itemisation gets you there when you are paying for inputs. A specified scope gets you there when you are paying for an outcome. What should worry you is a firm that offers neither.

One clause nobody has written, for the input case. Where you are paying for components and local counsel sits underneath your primary firm, there is a gap in the standard playbook. We looked for a published outside counsel guideline, from a bar body, a legal operations body, or any corporate template, addressing foreign associate transparency in trademark prosecution. There is none. No model clause exists requiring that the underlying local counsel invoice be visible to the client. The documented right to itemisation attaches to the instructing firm's own invoice and stops there.

So if you are being charged the associate's fee plus something, and you want to know what the something is, you are drafting that from first principles. In a multi-jurisdiction portfolio billed this way, that layer holds the largest share of your spend and the least of your visibility.

Three things make a clause like that work across borders, which matters because your firms are not all in one jurisdiction.

Ask for disclosure, not permission. Whether a firm may mark up a foreign associate's fee is a question of professional conduct rules, and those differ by country. What is permitted in one of your markets may not be in another, and you will not always know which regime applies to which invoice. Trying to prohibit markups puts you in an argument about local rules. Requiring that any markup, handling charge or administration fee be stated as a separate line sidesteps that entirely. Disclosure is something any firm can comply with anywhere, and it gets you the same information.

Attach it to the engagement, not the jurisdiction. Write it as a condition of instructing you rather than as a legal requirement. A firm that finds it onerous can decline the work, which is itself informative. This is a commercial term between client and firm, so it travels wherever your instructions travel.

Keep it to what a machine can read. Same principle as task codes. Ask for the associate's fee, any addition to it, and the currency and rate applied, each on its own line. A clause requiring reasonable transparency achieves nothing. A clause requiring three specific fields on an invoice can be checked automatically and enforced at the point of submission.

If enough clients ask for the same three fields in the same shape, it stops being an unusual request and starts being a format firms build for. That is how billing conventions actually spread, and there is nothing stopping a company outside the US from starting it.

What to ask your firm

Published RFP guidance converges on four questions: team experience, legal strategy, staffing, and project management, with pricing handled separately as a full breakdown by seniority rather than a blended rate. None of it is trademark-specific. Adapt it:

• How many of our jurisdictions do you handle directly, and how many through associates?

• For those handled through associates, what do you add to their fee, and is it disclosed?

• What docketing system do you use, and can we see our own portfolio in it?

• What is your record on missed renewal deadlines?

• What portfolio sizes do you handle, and who else in your book looks like us?

And know what you are already entitled to. Detailed invoices showing timekeeper and description of work, no attention-to entries, itemised disbursements. That is normal, documented, client-side requirement rather than an unusual ask.

What good looks like

There is no benchmark. No published source gives a credible cost per mark, per jurisdiction or per portfolio, and we looked hard. Anyone quoting you an industry average has made it up.

So good is a set of properties, not a figure.

• Repeatable in an afternoon. If next year means another archaeology project, nothing structural changed.

• Attributable. You can tie a cost to a mark, a jurisdiction and an activity. Totals by supplier are an accounts payable report, not a portfolio view.

• Predictable. Renewals are known years ahead and filings follow a plan, so trademark cost is one of the more forecastable things a legal department carries. If yours is not, that is the finding.

• Variance you can explain. A heavy quarter should have a reason you can state.

• A split you chose. Most companies discover they inherited it.

• No dead weight. Run the live mark list against the brands the business actually trades under. Marks renewing quietly for products nobody sells are the most common pure waste, invisible because renewals are what nobody looks at.

The test is not whether the number is low. It is whether you knew it was coming.

Where this fits

Worth doing if:

• You have more than a hundred marks and could not state your annual spend from memory.

• The portfolio spans several jurisdictions with more than one firm involved.

• Trademark costs arrive from more than one budget line, or you are not sure whether they do.

• You have been asked to cut legal spend and do not know which part of the trademark number is compressible.

Not worth the effort if:

• The portfolio is small and stable. A handful of marks, one or two jurisdictions, renewals only. The number is the invoice and you have it.

• The brand is not a strategic asset and the mark count is flat or shrinking. There is nothing to optimize.

Where we land

Do the count whoever you end up using. You can do all of it without us, and the guidelines section is worth doing even if you never change firms.

Worth saying plainly that we are not neutral here. We sell a fixed price, so we benefit when clients can see what hourly billing actually costs them. Check the reasoning rather than taking our word for it.

And apply the right test to us. We invoice a subscription plus a fixed all-in price on one-off work, so asking us to task-code a breakdown would be asking the wrong question. Ask what the number covers, what it excludes, what happens when something falls outside it, and what happens at renewal. Those are the ones we should have to answer, and we would rather you asked them before you signed than after.

We say elsewhere that we typically reduce outside counsel spend by 30 to 50 percent. That figure is worth nothing to you until you have a baseline of your own, because it is measured against what a company was actually paying before. A saving against an estimate is a sales claim. A saving against a real figure is a fact.

If you do run it with us, the split tells you where a saving would come from rather than whether we can do the work. We do the contested matters. Our attorneys run oppositions, refusals and enforcement, and that is the part of this job that needs a lawyer with a name on it.

But be clear-eyed about the arithmetic. Our advantage is that the mechanical layer costs us close to nothing, so the bigger your coordination and retrieval share, the more of your invoice we take out. If your spend is almost entirely contested work, we can still run it, and the saving will be smaller because there is less waste to remove. Worth knowing that before anyone quotes you a number.

We are a trademark law firm that built its own software. Admitted counsel does the legal work in every jurisdiction, ours or one of the 15 or more local counsel firms in our network. The system handles execution, which is why we price the relationship as one number rather than metering hours. Coordination is not something we bill for. Retrieval is not a request at all. Whether a mark covers a product in a market is something you look up, not something you commission.