Why your firm is not listed, and what would change that

IPRATE holds records for far more firms than it rates. Most firms in the corpus carry no published rating, and that is by design: publication requires evidence, and most filers do not have enough of it in any one cohort.

As of the current release:

• Firms analysed: 600,124
• Firms carrying a published rating: 23,921
• Countries covered: 32

The gap between the first two lines is deliberate, but it is also the single most common question the operator receives, so here is the full set of reasons a firm is not listed.

1. Below the evidence threshold

A rating is only as good as the number of finished matters behind it. A firm with four completed cases can look outstanding or catastrophic on almost any measure, and the difference will be luck. IPRATE therefore publishes a rating only when a firm clears a minimum case count inside the cohort being rated: the cumulative window has a higher floor than the emerging window, and both are published in the methodology.

Two consequences follow. The first is that a genuinely excellent boutique with a small caseload may never be rated in a large country, and that is the correct outcome for a measurement instrument, not a failure of it. The second is that a firm below threshold in one cohort is often above it in another: rated for trademarks and not for designs, or rated on the national track and not the European one.

This threshold cannot be waived, bought or appealed.

2. The filings are attributed to another name

This is the correctable one, and it is common. A firm may appear in the registers under a former name, a trading name, a transliteration, or the name of a predecessor partnership. In some registers the representative field holds an individual attorney rather than the firm. Where IPRATE has not connected those names, the filings sit in more than one place, and each fragment may fall below threshold on its own.

Aliases resolve this. An alias attaches an alternative name or an office identifier to a canonical entity, and the filings are then counted once. The identity is fixed; what changes is which register rows are recognised as belonging to it.

3. The work is outside the registers IPRATE holds

IPRATE covers trademark, design and patent filings at EUIPO, the EPO and the national offices of the countries it publishes. Several kinds of real, valuable IP work leave no trace there:

• Litigation and enforcement conducted in national courts.
• Transactional work: licensing, assignment negotiation, due diligence.
• Counselling that ends in a decision not to file.
• Filings made abroad through a local associate, which are recorded under the associate.

A firm whose practice is mostly of this kind will be thin in the registers however good it is. IPRATE measures filing and prosecution work, and says so on every surface.

4. Eligible, but not yet in a published release

Ratings are recomputed with each data release. A firm whose record has just crossed a threshold, or whose aliases were merged last week, appears in the next release rather than immediately. The site states the release it is serving, and the release notes record what changed.

What to do about it

Check the firm by name and country. The check returns one of three states in plain language: rated, with the cohorts and tiers it holds; tracked, meaning present in the registers but not above threshold; or not found. The full report, with the cohort detail and the thresholds that applied, arrives by email.

If the cause is a split record, reply to that report with the other names and any office identifiers. Attribution corrections are ordinary maintenance work and carry no charge. They also carry no promise: connecting a firm's filings can move it above a threshold, or show clearly that it is below one.