Trademark Opposition & Litigation Software: Recording Disputes Where They Belong

Disputes are part of the portfolio — record them that way

Every serious trademark practice eventually litigates: an opposition against a confusingly similar application, a cancellation action, an infringement dispute, an appeal. Yet in most firms these live in a separate world — a Word file here, a court date in someone’s Outlook there — disconnected from the very mark they’re about. IPBases treats a dispute as what it is: a record attached to the trademark, with its own dates, status and history, visible wherever the mark is visible.

The case record

A case in IPBases is created directly from (and linked to) a trademark, and carries the fields dispute work actually runs on:

• Case type — opposition, cancellation, infringement suit, appeal; free-typed so it matches your jurisdiction’s terminology, not a vendor’s dropdown.
• Status — open through resolved, so the case list doubles as the live disputes docket.
• Filed date and hearing date — the hearing date is the one that ruins careers when missed; here it sits in a column on the case index, sortable, next to the client and the mark.
• Description, notes, and an action log — every filing, extension and development appended to the case history rather than buried in email.

Because the case hangs off the trademark, the full context is one click away: the mark’s classes and status, its filing history, its documents, and the client behind it.

Confidentiality: litigation is permission-scoped

Dispute work is often the most sensitive data in the system. The Litigation module respects the same granular permission layer as everything else — you can grant case access to the litigation team and hard-deny it to everyone else, or switch the module off entirely for firms that don’t contest. And every change to a case lands in the audit trail.

Disputes feed deadlines and billing — automatically adjacent

An opposition generates response work; response work generates fees. Because cases live beside the docketing engine and the billing module, the workflow stays in one system: record the opposition, task the response, invoice the work — with the official-fee and professional-fee split IP billing needs — and notify the client through the built-in mail. Contrast that with the usual reality: proceedings before bodies like the USPTO’s TTAB or a national office tracked in a standalone spreadsheet that the renewals team never sees.