UKIPO Enters Trade Mark Discovery Phase This Month, as Class 45 Filings Fall 12.8% and Legal Services Brands Face a Three-Front Squeeze

The clock starts now

September 2026. The UK Intellectual Property Office is not waiting for anyone to notice.

This month, according to Stevens & Bolton's July briefing on the UKIPO Corporate Plan 2026 to 2027, the IPO enters a discovery phase for its new trade mark search and filing platform, the next stage of the One IPO Transformation Programme. Patents got their new digital service in April; trade marks are next in the queue. The discovery phase will assess how the current system can accommodate a broader range of mark types, improve usability, and eventually integrate into the single unified account that One IPO promises. Charlotte Champion, Head of Trade Marks at the UKIPO, told the INTA Annual Meeting in London that artificial intelligence is already used in figurative mark searches and that its role will expand considerably as the programme matures.

Practitioners who assumed trade mark reform was a vague future problem should update that assumption. It is now a September 2026 present-tense problem.

Three rules walked into a filing

The discovery phase lands at a moment when three separate changes are already compressing the economics of Class 45 registration. Legal professionals would do well to treat them as a package, not three independent irritants.

The fee increase. From 1 April 2026, online applications at the IPO rose to £205 per class, with additional classes attracting a further £60 each. Non-refundable. Paper filings rose to £250. The increase is part of the IPO's push toward digital submissions and platform investment, but the practical effect on multi-class filers is straightforward arithmetic: more expensive, full stop.

The UK genuine use rule. From 1 January 2026, owners of comparable UK trade marks derived from EU Trade Marks at Brexit can no longer rely on use in the EU as evidence of genuine use in UK revocation proceedings. Womble Bond Dickinson was direct about the consequence: registrations that have not seen substantive UK activity within the relevant five-year window are now vulnerable to third-party challenge, and evidence of use hastily commenced after the owner became aware of a threat may be disregarded entirely. For law firms and legal service providers that picked up comparable UK marks in 2021 and have since focused attention on the continent, the exposure is real.

The Nice 13th Edition. All applications filed from 1 January 2026 onward use the 13th edition of the Nice Classification. For Class 45 specifically, notarial services are now expressly recognised as legal services for the first time. Albright IP's April briefing on the new IPO practice notes flags that examiners will now object to manifestly broad specifications; applicants who file for sweeping terms such as "legal services" without further specificity can expect a two-month window to justify or amend. Existing registrations are not retroactively reclassified, but future renewals or modifications will need to reflect the updated terminology.

The filing numbers tell the story

AIBD's analysis of IPO Trade Marks Database data shows 1,388 UK Class 45 filings in Q3 2026, a fall of 12.8% against the prior period. Class 45 covers legal services, security services, and personal and social services: the heartland of law firms, IP practices, and company secretarial businesses seeking brand protection.

The drop is not mysterious. Higher per-class fees, the administrative overhead of the new genuine use calculus, and uncertainty about what the incoming platform redesign will look like have combined to push cautious filers into a wait-and-see posture. That posture is understandable. It is also, as will become clear below, potentially costly.

What this means for your Monday morning

Four steps, in order of urgency.

First, audit comparable UK marks for genuine use. If your firm or a client holds a comparable registration derived from an EUTM, assess whether genuine UK use can be evidenced for the relevant five-year period. The IPO will not act independently, but a competitor or bad-faith challenger will. The window to quietly shore up use evidence is not unlimited.

Second, review pending and planned specifications. Under the new IPO examination practice, broad class headings without further specification will trigger objection. Applications in preparation for Class 45 should be drafted with specificity from the outset, not amended under pressure after objection. Wasted fees are non-refundable.

Third, understand the Nice 13th Edition changes relevant to your classes. Notarial services in Class 45 is the headline change for legal services businesses, but the 13th edition touched all 45 classes. Check the WIPO classification tools before filing, not after.

Fourth, do not file a holding application to beat the platform transition. The discovery phase announced this month covers system design, not an imminent hard cutover. Filing a deliberately vague application now to avoid the new platform will produce an objection under the new examination practice. The fees are non-refundable. This outcome is entirely avoidable.

The SIC 2026 parallel

There is a pleasing structural similarity here with the SIC 2026 question currently preoccupying company secretarial practices. The ONS published SIC 2026 in April, explicitly recognising AI-related activities as a distinct category for the first time. Companies House has not yet mandated the new codes: the earliest that parallel acceptance of both SIC 2007 and SIC 2026 is expected is late 2026 to mid-2027, with mandatory adoption on Confirmation Statements (CS01) likely 2027 to 2028. The £50 online filing fee applies regardless.

Both situations follow the same logic: a new classification framework is published; operational adoption follows on a deferred timeline; practitioners who understand the new framework early can advise clients accurately rather than reactively. The SIC 2026 codes for legal activities and management consultancy are, in the majority of cases, unchanged from SIC 2007 equivalents. But 98 codes are retired and 11 are split into more specific sub-classifications. The converter tools are available now. Use them.

The broader AI note

The ONS's own analysis of AI in UK businesses, published in July 2026, found that large language models are the most widely used AI technology among businesses with ten or more employees, at 18% adoption. Only 10% of those businesses report using AI extensively, suggesting that most firms are in the tool-trial phase rather than the workflow-integration phase. The UKIPO's AI-augmented examination process, and the One IPO platform's AI-assisted figurative mark search, will arrive into a market where AI literacy in professional services is rising but uneven. Firms that understand what the IPO's AI is looking for will draft better specifications. Firms that do not will fund the non-refundable fees of everyone else.

Next deadline on the horizon

The ECCTA identity verification transition period ends 18 November 2026. All existing directors and PSCs must be fully verified by that date or face enforcement action, including rejection of the next Confirmation Statement. Companies House has been clear: an unverified CS01 will not be accepted, and rejection halts all other filings pending on the same company. Nine weeks. Count them.