Class 45 Filings Down 87.7% in Q4: What the UKIPO's Trade Mark Overhaul Means for Professional Services Firms

214. That Is the Number.

AIBD analysis of Intellectual Property Office Trade Mark Dashboard (TMD) data shows 214 UK trade mark filings in Nice Class 45 for Q4 2026 to date, a fall of 87.7% against the comparable prior period. For a class that covers legal services, notarial work, company secretarial services, and IP licensing arrangements, that is not a quiet quarter. That is a cliff edge. Something has changed, and practitioners would do well to understand what.

Two Fuses, One Box

The filing drop lands during a period of genuine structural turbulence for Class 45 applicants. Two developments, each disruptive on its own, have arrived simultaneously.

First, the UKIPO's One IPO Transformation Programme is now moving its attention explicitly to trade mark services. The UKIPO Corporate Plan 2026 to 2027, alongside remarks attributed to Charlotte Champion, Head of Trade Marks at the UKIPO, at the INTA Annual Meeting in London, indicates that initial design work on a new trade mark filing and search platform is planned during 2026 to 2027. Industry commentary suggests the UKIPO began a discovery phase for updating its platform from September 2026. For professional services firms weighing whether to file now or wait for a cleaner, more capable system, that signal creates a rational hesitation.

Second, the Nice Classification itself changed on 1 January 2026. The 13th Edition (NCL 13-2026) brought changes to all 45 classes. For Class 45 specifically, notarial services are now expressly recognised, resolving an ambiguity that had caused specification drafters unnecessary grief for years. Artificial intelligence as a service found its home in Class 42. That reallocation matters: firms that were filing AI-related professional services in Class 45 must now reconsider whether Class 42 is the correct shelter. A misfiled application is not just inefficient; as any practitioner will remind you, the wrong class cannot be corrected after filing.

The Fee Increase Did Not Help

From 1 April 2026, UKIPO online filing fees increased to £205 for the first class, up from £170, with each additional class now costing £60. Those numbers are not ruinous for a properly funded firm. But they are the kind of increase that prompts a deferral conversation in a cost-conscious professional services practice, and deferral conversations in Q2 have a habit of becoming Q4 absences. The fee hike, the platform transition signals, and the NCL reclassification questions all landed within the same calendar year.

Timing, as ever, is everything.

The Cloned Mark Problem Nobody Wants to Discuss

There is a third complication specific to the legal services sector. From 1 January 2026, owners of UK cloned trade mark registrations (those created automatically at Brexit from EU registrations) can no longer rely on use of the mark in the EU as evidence of genuine use in the UK. For firms that have been operating under an EUTM umbrella and assuming the UK clone is safely maintained, this is an uncomfortable awakening. If EU use has been the only use, UK registration is now vulnerable to revocation proceedings. Many professional services firms, particularly those with pan-European footprints, are sitting on registrations they believe to be sound and which may not be.

The UKIPO will not send a reminder. That is not how it works.

What This Means for Your Monday Morning

The 87.7% filing drop in Class 45 may partly reflect rational market behaviour: practitioners pausing while NCL 13-2026 beds in, platform transition creates uncertainty, and cloned-mark portfolios are audited. But it may also reflect inertia dressed up as strategy. Either way, there are three tasks worth putting on the desk before the end of October.

Step 1: Audit your Class 45 portfolio. Pull every live UK registration or application that references legal services, company secretarial services, IP licensing, or consultancy. Confirm that the specification language still maps correctly to NCL 13-2026 class headings. Notarial services now have an explicit home. AI-facilitated professional services may have moved.

Step 2: Check your cloned marks. For any comparable UK registration derived from an EU trade mark, document UK use from 1 January 2021 onwards. EU use from that date does not count. If the evidence file is thin, either commence genuine UK use immediately or take an honest view on whether the registration is worth defending. Revocation applications cost money; so does the commercial exposure of losing a registration you assumed was safe.

Step 3: Do not wait for the new platform. The UKIPO's discovery phase for its trade mark service redesign began in September 2026. Design work, build, testing, and rollout will take time measured in years, not quarters. Filing on the existing system is not a second-class option. Priority dates are priority dates. A registration filed on an imperfect platform is still a registration.

The ICO Complication

For professional services firms that have added AI-assisted decision tools to their compliance or secretarial workflows, there is a parallel pressure worth tracking. SI 2026/425 came into force on 12 May 2026, placing the Information Commissioner under a statutory duty to produce a Code of Practice on AI and automated decision-making. The statutory code itself is not yet drafted; it is expected in 2027. But the substantive obligations under Articles 22A to 22D of the UK GDPR, inserted by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 on 5 February 2026, are already live. The test the ICO now applies is not whether a human was nominally present at a decision, but whether there was meaningful human involvement. Clicking 'approve' on an AI-generated compliance recommendation is not oversight. The ICO reviewed 30 UK employers and said precisely that.

For company secretarial teams using AI document review or automated filings-triage, that standard applies now. The code will sharpen it.

The Bigger Picture

Class 45 has always been a decent barometer for professional services confidence. Firms that are growing, diversifying, or defending brand equity file in Class 45. A filing volume of 214 in an entire quarter, against a backdrop of fee increases, a classification overhaul, a platform in transition, and a Brexit-era use-cliff, suggests the sector is catching its breath rather than contracting. But catching your breath for too long is just holding it.

Next Deadline on the Horizon

Companies House confirmation statements with a made-up date of 1 November 2026 are due by 14 days from that date: file by 15 November 2026. Separately, any legal services firm relying on a cloned UK trade mark where EU use stopped before 1 January 2021 has a live vulnerability today. There is no deadline to miss; the risk is already present. The UKIPO will not schedule your crisis for your convenience.