Ninety-one per cent of patent and trade mark attorneys hold a litigation certificate
3,576 of 3,924 registrants may conduct intellectual property litigation. IPReg states the disciplinary position on every single entry, and across the whole register the answer is zero.
By Rose Traviss · 28 September 2026
IPReg’s register is the largest of the smaller legal professions — 3,924 entries against 2,428 licensed conveyancers, 1,211 certificated enforcement agents, 817 notaries and 789 costs lawyers. It is also the only one of them where the regulator already publishes a page per registrant, which makes it the only one where reading the register properly means fetching four thousand pages rather than one.
Doing so turns up two things the headline count does not.
Nearly all of them can litigate
An IP Litigation Certificate authorises its holder to conduct intellectual property litigation. 3,576 of the 3,924 entries hold one — 91.1%. A further 166 hold a Higher Courts Litigation Certificate and 18 a Higher Courts Advocacy Certificate.
| Certificate | Holders |
|---|---|
| IP Litigation Certificate | 3,576 |
| Higher Courts Litigation Certificate | 166 |
| Higher Courts Advocacy Certificate | 18 |
For comparison: among costs lawyers, the right to conduct litigation comes with the qualification and is not separately recorded; among licensed conveyancers it does not exist at all. Patent and trade mark attorneys are, on the register’s own face, a profession of litigators — which is not how the profession is usually described, and not how it is usually described to people choosing between an attorney and a solicitor for an infringement dispute.
The register does not say why the proportion is so high, and this piece does not guess. It records the certificate and the date it was awarded, and nothing about the route to it.
A zero you can actually count
Against every one of the 3,924 entries, IPReg prints a disciplinary history — and where there is nothing, it prints “No history found” rather than omitting the field. The position is therefore stated on 3,924 of 3,924 entries, and the number with a published finding is zero.
That is worth separating into two facts, because they are different.
The second — no published findings — is a fact about the profession, or about IPReg’s publication policy, or both, and this site cannot tell which from the register alone.
The first is a fact about the register, and it is the more useful one. A register that states the negative can be counted from. A register that simply omits the field when there is nothing to report cannot: absence proves nothing, because it is indistinguishable from the field not being published. Of the five registers collected here, only IPReg and the Costs Lawyer Standards Board state the negative. The CLSB, which does, shows 31 of 789 with a published decision. The other three registers are silent in a way that cannot be read either way, and the comparison table says so in a column of its own.
Two registers, and 184 people on both
IPReg keeps two registers and one search. Splitting the entries by which they appear on:
| On which register | Attorneys |
|---|---|
| Register of Patent Attorneys | 2,823 |
| Register of Trade Mark Attorneys | 911 |
| Both | 184 |
| Not stated | 6 |
IPReg’s own published figures, as recorded in this project’s research, put the register at 3,690 at 1 April 2025 — 2,631 patent, 859 trade mark, 200 on both. Set against what was collected here in September 2026, the two single registers have grown and the dually-qualified group has shrunk, from 200 to 184.
That comparison comes with a health warning this site applies everywhere. The IPReg figure is marked secondary on the profession page: it was recorded from a research note rather than read from IPReg’s own current publication, so it has not been checked against source. A sixteen-person movement over eighteen months is well inside the range a definitional difference would produce — whether firms are counted, whether non-practising registrants are included — and it should not be reported as a trend until the primary figure has been read.
The most London profession here
41.8% of patent and trade mark attorneys with an address on the register give one in London — 1,457 of 3,487. Against 26.0% of notaries, 24.2% of costs lawyers and 7.1% of licensed conveyancers, that is the sharpest concentration of any profession this site collects.
The employer side is concentrated too, though less than the geography suggests: 560 distinct employers for the 3,272 attorneys who give one, with the eight largest firms holding 816 between them — 24.9%.
| Employer | Attorneys |
|---|---|
| Marks & Clerk LLP | 132 |
| HGF Ltd | 131 |
| Mewburn Ellis LLP | 125 |
| Carpmaels & Ransford LLP | 91 |
| Dehns | 90 |
| Venner Shipley LLP | 85 |
| Kilburn & Strode LLP | 81 |
| J A Kemp LLP | 81 |
500 patent attorneys and 124 trade mark attorneys are recorded as “solely undertaking corporate work” — in-house, at the companies whose patents they prosecute rather than at a firm. That is one in six of the register, and it is a category no other regulator here records at all.
A correction, and what it was a correction to
An earlier version of this piece said that because IPReg publishes a page per registrant, a page here would be competing with the regulator’s own rather than filling a gap. That was an inference from the fact that the URLs exist, and it was wrong.
Measuring it: across searches for all 3,924 attorneys on the register, ipreg.org.uk appears in the results for ten of them, and only two of those ten are per-attorney pages. The Costs Lawyer Standards Board, which publishes no per-person page at all — its register is a single table — appears in the results for 87% of the costs lawyers on it, almost always as that one URL.
So the regulator with 3,924 individual pages is invisible in search for its own registrants, and the regulator with one page is not. Publishing a URL per person and being findable are different things, and the second does not follow from the first.
The claim had reached four files and two pages of this site before anybody measured it, which is the more useful lesson: a structural fact about a website is cheap to check and an inference about its consequences is not the same kind of statement.
Source: the IPReg register, collected 28 September 2026 — every listing page
and all 4,184 detail pages. The ranking figures are from
serp_analysis.py over one Google search per practitioner. IPReg publishes no
re-use terms this project could locate; see sources and licences.