Business Question 

Many companies run their trademark monitoring on a quarterly, or even semi-annual, cadence — the legal or marketing team periodically pulls a search report on trademark publications, screens for similar marks worth attention, and then decides whether to file an opposition. Under the previous three-month opposition window, this cadence was, just barely, workable. Once the new Law takes effect, that same process may shift from merely adequate to systematically too slow.

The opposition period shrinking from three months to two sounds like the loss of thirty days, but for a company's internal decision-making process, those thirty days may be precisely the buffer that sits between spotting an issue and completing a decision with the supporting evidence in hand. This installment is not about how companies should adjust their processes — it is about a question brand owners may find more worth sitting with themselves: what, exactly, does the shortened opposition period compress?

  Legal Update 

Chapter IV (Articles 32 through 42) governs the examination and approval of trademark registration, and the chapter as a whole is oriented around speeding up the process.

The change genuinely worth attention in this chapter centers on Article 36: the period for opposing a trademark for which a preliminary approval announcement has been published is shortened from three months under the current Law to two months; where no opposition is filed by the end of the announcement period, the trademark is approved for registration and a certificate is issued. The window companies have to spot a risk, decide whether to oppose, and prepare the supporting materials has been compressed by a third.

Several related procedural adjustments accompany this change: Article 32 retains the nine-month period for preliminary examination; Article 38 requires a decision on an opposition within twelve months of the end of the announcement period. Article 39 is worth a closer look: where an opposition is found unfounded and the mark is approved for registration, the registrant's exclusive right is calculated as accruing from the date the two-month announcement period expires, and no liability attaches retroactively to another party's good-faith use of a similar sign during the period between the end of the announcement and the approval decision — meaning good-faith use during this “gap period” will generally not be revisited or penalized, absent bad faith on the user's part. The remaining provisions are largely procedural backstops rather than the focus of this revision, and we will not dwell on them here.

  Practical Analysis 

Why has the opposition period been shortened from three months to two? This adjustment is of a piece with the new Law's broader logic of accelerating registration confirmation while reinforcing genuine use.

The longer opposition period under the current Law traded time for certainty, in a sense — giving prior rights holders a more generous window to spot conflicts, assess risk, and prepare materials, at the cost of lengthening the overall registration confirmation timeline, with a large number of uncontested marks carried along through that longer waiting period regardless. The new Law's broader approach — compressing the confirmation timeline so that uncontested marks reach stable registration faster — amounts to a rebalancing of certainty against efficiency: the legislature appears to have concluded that the vast majority of trademark applications involve no genuine conflict of rights, and that there is little reason to make every applicant wait out a three-month period designed for the small minority of contested cases.

This judgment rests on an assumption that prior rights holders are capable of completing monitoring and decision-making within a shorter window — in other words, the legislature has shifted more of the responsibility for spotting conflicts and responding promptly onto rights holders themselves. What the new Law genuinely compresses is not the opposition period itself, but the room a company's internal decision-making process previously had to absorb inefficiency. The three-month window, in a sense, had been masking delays already present in many companies' monitoring and decision processes — delays that the two-month window will now expose directly.

  Practical Impact 

The most immediate impact of the shortened opposition period falls on the mismatch between a company's monitoring cadence and its decision-making cadence.

Consider an example: a brand has historically run a quarterly trademark monitoring process — the legal department searches trademark publications once every three months, screens for similar marks, submits findings for internal review, and only initiates opposition proceedings once that review is complete. Under the previous three-month opposition window, this process was tight but could, in theory, run its full course within the available time. Once the new Law takes effect, the announcement period shortens to two months — shorter than the company's own monitoring cycle itself — meaning the opposition period may well expire before the company has even completed its next quarterly search. A mark that could have been opposed will already have been approved for registration, forcing the company to fall back on the costlier, slower invalidation procedure instead (which we examine in Part VI of this series).

This mismatch is not an isolated risk facing any one company — it is a systemic risk for any company still operating on a low-frequency, batch-search monitoring model. The shortened window is simply the visible symptom; what is actually being tested is whether a company's monitoring cadence and internal decision chain can keep pace with the new statutory timeline.

  GreRoyalt Observation 

In assisting clients with trademark opposition matters in recent years, we have noticed a recurring pattern: what causes a company to miss the opposition window is rarely a failure to spot a similar mark — far more often, it is that internal discussion, business judgment, and evidence preparation, once a conflict has been identified, simply take longer than expected. Monitoring tools and search capabilities have, by now, become fairly mature, and most companies are not actually short on the ability to detect conflicts. The real bottleneck tends to surface after detection — assessing whether a mark is worth opposing, determining what evidence is needed, and identifying who signs off — steps that, absent a clear internal division of responsibility established in advance, often only get worked out once an alert has already arrived.

For companies that already maintain mature brand management systems, this need not mean building an entirely new process from scratch — it more likely means revisiting whether the existing monitoring and decision-making mechanism can still keep pace with this shortened statutory cycle. A process that ran smoothly within a three-month window will not necessarily handle a two-month window with the same ease.

  Points to Consider 

?  Is your current trademark monitoring frequency sufficient to cover a two-month opposition window?

?  Between identifying a potential conflict and reaching a decision to oppose, are there internal approval steps that could affect timeliness?

?  For a suspected conflict, does it first need to be classified — as a similar trademark, company name, store name, domain name, or other commercial identifier — before determining whether opposition is even the appropriate path (see the Brand Conflict Matrix introduced in the third installment of this series)?

In the next installment: “When Facing Bad-Faith Registration, What Is the Fastest Path to Resolution?” — examining the limitation periods and retroactive-effect exceptions under the invalidation system, and how companies, once the opposition window has passed, should choose among non-use cancellation, invalidation, and other available procedures.

This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice for any specific matter. Please consult qualified counsel regarding your particular circumstances.