New research from Allentra USA and Mathys & Squire reveals a consistent pattern of intellectual property exposure among growth-stage UK businesses planning, or already trading in, the United States.
UK companies are entering the US market in significant numbers without even basic protection for their brands, patents and other intellectual property, according to new research from management consultancy Allentra USA and intellectual property law firm Mathys & Squire.
The findings make uncomfortable reading. Some 76 per cent of the UK companies covered by the research that were in the process of expanding into the US had not registered their core brand names or product marks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Among firms already trading in the US, the figure was higher still, at 78 per cent.
One company in the cohort had already learned the lesson the hard way, finding itself locked in a trademark dispute with a US entity operating under a similar name. Mathys & Squire points out that the row could have been avoided altogether by conducting availability searches and filing a trademark application with the USPTO before launch, at a cost that is trivial compared with that of a US legal dispute.
Rebecca Tew, trademark attorney at Mathys & Squire, said: “It is a concern that UK companies that are already investing money to build their brand in the US have not implemented basic IP protection nor assessed their freedom to operate. This is an important step before any business expansion, but particularly in the US, which is known to be litigious and where the costs of defending an action are high. Failing to protect your IP properly could jeopardise your entire investment in a new market.”
Ian Collins, founder of Allentra USA, which advises businesses on US market entry, added: “For most ambitious UK companies, the US represents the single largest commercial opportunity available. However, it also operates by entirely different rules from the UK and Europe.
“In ten years of working with over 3,500 companies on international expansion, the pattern is consistent. The companies that avoid the expensive mistakes are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that asked the right questions early enough to act on the answers.”
Across the cohort, the most common failing was not deliberate negligence but a straightforward, and mistaken, assumption: that UK patent and trademark registrations provide meaningful protection in the US. They do not. As official government guidance on protecting UK intellectual property abroad makes clear, IP rights are territorial, and a separate US patent filing must be made, within a limited window, if an invention is to be protected there.
The trap is deeper still for trademarks. The US operates on a “first to use” basis rather than the “first to file” principle familiar to UK businesses. A company can spend years building a brand at home only to discover that someone else holds prior rights to the name in America simply by having used it there first, a risk explored in Business Matters’ guide to filing an international trademark.
The commercial consequences of discovering this at the wrong moment are significant. USPTO trademark opposition or cancellation proceedings typically cost between £15,000 and £40,000 in legal fees; full litigation is a multiple of that. The more pragmatic routes, a negotiated coexistence agreement or a differentiated US brand identity, are almost always cheaper, but only if the risk is identified before it becomes a conflict.
On the patent side, the deadlines are unforgiving. If a US application is not filed within 12 months of a first public disclosure or sale by the inventor, or within 12 months of an earlier UK filing, it may no longer be possible to protect the invention in the US, or anywhere. It is a gap that echoes earlier warnings that UK businesses risk losing billions by neglecting overseas patents.
The research also identified a cluster of recurring secondary issues. Technology companies frequently assume software cannot be patented; it can, and the US landscape for software-implemented inventions is materially different from the UK and EU, often more favourable. In other cases, trade secret protection paired with robust confidentiality provisions can prove the more practical defence.
Companies licensing IP from a UK parent to a US subsidiary face a further trap: the documentation behind that licence, and the fee structure it embeds, must satisfy both HMRC and the IRS, a requirement routinely overlooked until it causes a problem. And for businesses planning significant US marketing spend, the freedom-to-operate question should be answered before the money goes out of the door, not after.
Perhaps the most urgent practical finding concerns timing. USPTO trademark registrations take nine to twelve months, often longer, from application to grant. Firms that wait until launch will spend the entire critical brand-building period without certainty of protection. With a sharper US strategy now seen as critical for UK firms targeting 2026 growth, the message from the research is blunt: the cost of clearance searches and a trademark filing is modest relative to the cost of the problem it prevents.
