Nigeria Trademark Docketing: 11 Critical Dates and the 7-Year Term That Starts at Filing

Most docketing systems assume a ten-year term starting on the certificate date. Nigeria trademark docketing breaks both halves of that assumption. Section 23(1) of the Trade Marks Act gives a first term of seven years and renewals of fourteen, and section 22(2) provides that a mark, when registered, is registered as of the date of the application — that date being taken for the purposes of the Act to be the date of registration.

The term therefore runs from filing, so prosecution time is subtracted from the life of the mark instead of added to it. Nigeria is also outside the Madrid System, so no central renewal reaches it. Here are the eleven dates, with the section or regulation behind each.

Why Nigeria Trademark Docketing Breaks a US-Built Record

Almost every docketing system in use today encodes one assumption so deeply that nobody states it out loud: that a trademark term is ten years long and starts on the day the registry issues the certificate. Change the term length and most systems cope. Change the anchor date and they produce confidently wrong answers for the life of the mark.

Nigeria changes both. The term is seven years, not ten. Renewals are fourteen years, not ten. And the seven years do not run from the certificate — they run from the day the application was filed, which in Nigeria is deemed by statute to be the registration date. A Nigerian mark that took two years to register has five years of term left on the day the certificate arrives.

That is the core of why Nigeria trademark docketing cannot be done by analogy. Every other date on the record — the renewal, the next renewal, the citation window after removal — is computed from an anchor that most software does not have a field for. Below are the eleven dates a Nigerian record has to store, each tied to the section or regulation that creates it.

Section 23(1): Seven Years First, Then Fourteen Forever

Section 23(1) of the Trade Marks Act is blunt: “The registration of a trade mark shall be for a period of seven years, but may be renewed from time to time in accordance with the provisions of this section.”

Section 23(2) then sets the renewal term: the Registrar shall renew “for a period of fourteen years from the date of expiration of the original registration or of the last renewal of registration, as the case may be.”

So the cycle is asymmetric — 7, then 14, then 14, indefinitely. This is not a rounding quirk; it is a structural difference from the ten-year cycle used by the USPTO, the EUIPO and most Madrid members. A system that stores a single “term length” integer per jurisdiction will get the first renewal right and every subsequent one wrong, or the reverse.

There is also a legacy trap in the proviso to section 23(1): for a registration dated before the Act commenced, the subsection takes effect “with the substitution of a period of fourteen years for the said period of seven years.” Very old Nigerian registrations therefore had a fourteen-year first term. If you inherited a portfolio with pre-commencement filing dates, the first-term rule is not uniform across the book.

Section 22(2): The Term Runs From Filing, Not From Your Certificate

This is the provision that decides whether a Nigerian docket is right or wrong, and it is the one the ranking guides most often skip. Section 22(2) provides that “a trade mark, when registered, shall be registered as of the date of the application for registration, and that date shall be taken for the purposes of this Act to be the date of registration.”

Read it carefully. It does not say the term is backdated as a courtesy. It says the application date is the date of registration “for the purposes of this Act” — and section 23(1), which sets the seven-year term, is one of those purposes. The clock starts at filing.

Section 22(3) separately requires the Registrar to issue a certificate “on the registration of a trade mark.” The certificate is evidence of the registration, not the start of it. Two different dates, two different jobs, and a docketing system needs both: the filing date to compute expiry, and the certificate date to prove the right exists.

The practical consequence is that the single most common Nigerian docketing error is also the most invisible one. Nobody notices a renewal date that is two years too late until the year it matters, because the record looks internally consistent the whole time.

The Arithmetic Nobody Publishes: What Prosecution Delay Costs You

Because the term runs from filing, prosecution time is subtracted from the enforceable life of the mark rather than added to it. Nigerian registration commonly takes somewhere between twelve and twenty-four months from filing to certificate, and longer where an opposition or an objection intervenes.

Work the arithmetic through on a mark filed on 15 March 2026:

Event	Date	Term remaining at that point
Application filed (= date of registration, s.22(2))	15 Mar 2026	7 years 0 months
Acceptance and advertisement under s.19	say Nov 2026	about 6 years 4 months
Opposition window closes (s.20(1), two months)	say Jan 2027	about 6 years 2 months
Certificate issued (s.22(3))	say Jun 2027	about 5 years 9 months
Renewal window opens (reg 66, 3 months before)	15 Dec 2032	3 months
Registration expires (s.23(1))	15 Mar 2033	0
Renewed term ends (s.23(2), fourteen years)	15 Mar 2047	—

The owner in this example holds a certificate for about five years and nine months, not seven years. If the docket had been built from the certificate date, the stored expiry would read June 2034 instead of March 2033 — fifteen months late, which is well past every window the Regulations provide for fixing it.

This is also why the first renewal is the dangerous one. After the first renewal the anchor becomes the previous expiry date under section 23(2), which is a date your own system generated and is therefore internally consistent. The error, if there is one, is baked in at the start and then propagates cleanly forever.

Regulation 66: A Three-Month Window You Cannot Open Early

The Act leaves the renewal mechanics to the Trade Marks Regulations 1967, and regulation 66 is narrower than most practitioners expect. The renewal fee may be left with the Registrar on Form 12 “at any time not more than three months before the expiration of the last registration of a trade mark.”

Note the direction of that limit. It is a ceiling, not a floor. Three months before expiry is the earliest you may pay, not the latest. Nigeria does not offer the six-month advance window that UK, EU and US practice conditions people to expect, and an attempt to renew five months out is simply premature.

For a docketing system this inverts the normal reminder design. The usual pattern — tickle at six months, chase at three, escalate at one — produces a first reminder that cannot be acted on. The correct Nigerian ladder has an internal preparation tickle (gather the proprietor details, confirm the authorisation of agent, check for recorded assignments) and then a separate, later actionable date at exactly three months before expiry, when payment first becomes possible.

Regulation 66 also says “any person” may leave the fee. That is useful in practice: a licensee, a distributor or a local agent can pay to preserve the registration where the proprietor is unreachable, which is worth knowing before a deadline is allowed to lapse for want of instructions.

Regulations 67 and 68: Two Registrar Notices, One Discretionary

The Act promises a reminder. Section 23(3) requires that “at the prescribed time before the expiration of the last registration of a trade mark, the Registrar shall send notice in the prescribed manner to the registered proprietor of the date of expiration and the conditions as to payment of fees.”

The Regulations then prescribe two notices, and they are not equally reliable as a matter of law:

• Regulation 67 — at a date “not less than one month and not more than two months before the expiration,” if no Form 12 fee has been received, the Registrar shall notify the registered proprietor in writing.
• Regulation 68 — at a time “not less than fourteen days and not more than one month before the expiration,” if still no fee has been received, the Registrar may send a further notice.

The first is mandatory, the second discretionary. Both are conditional on no fee having arrived, and both are addressed to the “registered proprietor” — which means they go to the address on the register. If an assignment has not been recorded, or an agent of record has changed, the statutory reminder is being posted to someone who is no longer watching.

The Nigeria trademark docketing conclusion is the uncomfortable one: a Nigerian renewal cannot be run on inbound notices. The notices are a backstop addressed to a register entry, not a service addressed to you. The same reasoning appears in our review of recurring trademark docketing errors — any deadline whose only alarm is generated by a third party is an undocketed deadline.

Regulation 69: The Grace Period Is One Month From an Advertisement

Here is the detail that separates a correct Nigerian record from a plausible one. Regulation 69 provides that if the renewal fee has not been paid at the date of expiration, the Registrar “shall advertise the fact forthwith in the Journal,” and if “within one month of that advertisement” the Form 12 fee together with an additional fee on Form 13 is received, the Registrar may renew the registration.

Read the anchor. The one month runs from the date of the Journal advertisement — not from the expiry date. Those are different dates, and the gap between them is set by the Registry’s publication cycle, not by your calendar.

That has three consequences a docketing system has to handle explicitly. First, the grace deadline is unknowable on the day of expiry: you cannot compute it, you have to observe it. Second, the only way to observe it is to monitor the Trade Marks Journal for the advertisement of your own lapsed mark. Third, because “forthwith” is not a fixed interval, a mark that expires in January and one that expires in February may have grace deadlines that are not one month apart.

The honest way to docket this is a two-field design: a computed expiry date from section 22(2) plus section 23, and a separate observed field for the advertisement date, left null until the Journal entry is found. A single “grace expiry” column computed as expiry plus one month is a guess, and in the one case where it matters it will be a late guess.

Reconciling the Contradiction: Why Guides Say One, Three and Six Months

Search for the Nigerian grace period and you will be told, by pages that all rank, that it is one month, that it is three months, and that it is six months. Those pages are not describing three different rules. They are describing one rule, two misreadings and an import.

Claim you will read	What it actually is
“One month grace after expiry”	Closest to right, wrong anchor. Regulation 69 gives one month from the Journal advertisement, not from expiry.
“Three month grace after expiry”	Regulation 66 read backwards. The three months is the pre-expiry window in which the fee may first be paid.
“Six months to renew late”	Imported from UK, EU or US practice. No Nigerian provision supplies a six-month post-expiry period.
“Renew any time up to removal”	Describes the Registrar’s discretion under reg 69 and reg 70, which is real but is discretion, not a deadline you can rely on.

The last row deserves care, because it is the one that is half-true in a dangerous way. Section 23(3) says the Registrar “may remove” the mark, and regulation 70 allows restoration after removal. So late payment is sometimes accepted, and marks are sometimes restored. But a power exercised at the Registrar’s discretion is not a docketing entitlement, and no competent calendar should contain a date whose basis is “they are usually relaxed about this.”

If you want one sentence to put in your jurisdiction notes: pay within the three months before expiry under regulation 66, treat anything after expiry as recovery rather than renewal, and never promise a client a post-expiry window measured from the expiry date.

Regulation 70: Removal, Restoration and the Registrar’s Discretion

If the regulation 69 month passes without payment, the mark may be removed from the register. Regulation 70 then provides the recovery route: restoration on payment of the renewal fee on Form 12 together with a restoration fee on Form 14. Regulation 71 handles the register entries and the advertisement of a renewal or restoration.

Two features of restoration matter for docketing. It is discretionary rather than automatic — the Act frames removal as subject to “such conditions, if any, as to its restoration to the register as may be prescribed,” and the prescribed route turns on the Registrar being satisfied that restoration is just. And it is fee-bearing twice over, since the renewal fee does not disappear because the mark lapsed.

The Nigeria trademark docketing design point is to stop treating “removed” as a terminal status. A removed Nigerian mark has an open recovery file and at least one live downstream effect, which is the subject of the next section. Closing the record at removal loses both.

Section 23(4): The Removed Mark That Still Blocks Applications

Section 23(4) is a provision with no close analogue in US practice, and it cuts both ways depending on which side of a clearance search you are standing on. Where a mark “has been removed from the register for non payment of the fee for renewal, it shall, nevertheless, for the purpose of any application for the registration of a trade mark during one year next after the date of the removal, be deemed to be a trade mark that is already on the register.”

So a lapsed Nigerian mark keeps citation power for a year after removal. It can be raised against a later application even though it is gone from the register.

The proviso then removes that effect where the court is satisfied either that there has been no bona fide trade use of the removed mark during the two years immediately preceding its removal, or — in the alternative limb — in the circumstances the section sets out for resembling marks. The practical test is the use question: a mark that was both unrenewed and unused loses the zombie year.

Two docketing jobs fall out of this. For your own lapsed marks, the removal date starts a one-year clock worth tracking, because it is a year in which a competitor’s application can still be resisted. For clearance work, a register that looks clear may not be: a search run eleven months after someone else’s removal needs the removal date, not just the current status. Our trademark docketing checklist treats removal dates as retained data for exactly this reason.

Section 22(4): The Twelve-Month Completion Trap

One more date sits on the prosecution side and is routinely left off Nigerian dockets entirely. Section 22(4) provides that where registration “is not completed within twelve months from the date of the application by reason of default on the part of the applicant,” the Registrar may, after giving written notice of the non-completion, treat the application as abandoned unless it is completed within the time specified in that notice.

The conditions are worth separating out, because the provision is narrower than it first reads. The twelve months runs from the application date. The delay must be attributable to applicant default, so Registry backlog does not trigger it. The Registrar “may” act rather than must. And abandonment follows only after a notice that itself specifies a period.

Narrow or not, it produces a real docket entry: a twelve-month review date from filing on every pending Nigerian application, asking one question — is anything outstanding on our side? Combined with the section 22(2) anchor, this means the filing date in a Nigerian record drives both the expiry calculation and a prosecution review. It is the single highest-value field on the row.

Section 20: Two Months to Oppose, One Month to Answer

The opposition clocks are short, and the second one is unforgiving. Under section 20(1), “any person may within two months from the date of the publication under section 19 of this Act of notice of an application give notice to the Registrar of opposition to the registration.” Two months from publication — not the three months that EU and UK practice trains people to expect.

Section 20(3) is the dangerous one. The Registrar sends a copy of the opposition to the applicant, and “within one month after the date on which the copy is received by the applicant the applicant shall send to the Registrar in the prescribed manner a counter statement of the grounds on which he relies for his application and, if he does not do so, shall be treated as having abandoned his application.”

Three things about that deadline make it a docketing problem rather than a diary entry. It is one month, which is short. The sanction is automatic abandonment of the application, not a default judgment you can seek to set aside in the ordinary way. And it runs from receipt by the applicant, which is a date your own file knows and the register does not.

A docketing system that records opposition deadlines from published dates will have no value here at all. The counter-statement date has to be entered by hand on the day the copy arrives, from the date-stamp on the document, and it should be entered with the abandonment consequence written into the task description so that nobody triages it as routine correspondence.

Section 20(5) adds a further exposure: the Registrar may require either side to give security for costs, and “in default of such security being duly given may treat the opposition or application, as the case may be, as abandoned.” A second route to abandonment, triggered by a request rather than by a calendar date. Our trademark docketing best practices note covers the general principle: any request that can terminate a matter must create a docket entry when it is received.

Section 31(2)(b): Five Years of Non-Use, Measured a Month Early

Nigerian non-use vulnerability is set by section 31. A registered mark may be taken off the register on application by any person concerned on either of two grounds, and the one that matters for a maintained portfolio is section 31(2)(b): that “up to the date one month before the date of the application a continuous period of five years or longer elapsed during which the trade mark was a registered trade mark and during which there was no bona fide use thereof.”

Five years is the headline figure. The month is the detail. The five-year period is measured up to the date one month before the cancellation application, which means use commenced in the final month before an application is filed falls outside the window the tribunal looks at. The offset appears in section 31(2)(a) as well, for the no-bona-fide-intention ground.

Section 31(3) then gives the proprietor a defence: the tribunal may refuse the application where there has been bona fide use of the mark on goods of the same description as those the application relates to, being goods for which the mark is registered. Use on neighbouring goods within the registration can therefore answer a narrow attack.

For docketing purposes Nigeria produces a use review rather than a use filing. There is no periodic declaration of use to submit, so nothing in the inbox will ever remind you. The review has to be self-generated, and the natural cadence is a standing check that no registered Nigerian mark has been through five continuous years without evidence of use being collected and stored.

No Madrid Route: Nigeria Outside the 117

Nigeria is a member of WIPO, but it is not a contracting party to the Madrid Protocol. Checked against the WIPO Lex list of contracting parties on 2 November 2026, the Protocol has 117 parties, of which 24 are African states or regional organisations — Nigeria is not among them.

Two conclusions follow directly, and both are docketing conclusions rather than filing-strategy ones. An international registration cannot designate Nigeria, so Nigerian protection requires a national application at the Trademarks, Patents and Designs Registry, now operating as IPO Nigeria within the Commercial Law Department of the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment. And no central WIPO renewal reaches a Nigerian right.

The second point is the one that causes damage in a mixed portfolio. Where a client holds an international registration covering a dozen designations plus a separate Nigerian national registration, the WIPO ten-year renewal cycle covers the designations and silently does not cover Nigeria. The Nigerian record needs its own seven-then-fourteen cycle running on its own filing-date anchor, flagged so that it is never folded into the international renewal.

This is the same structural problem we described for the other significant non-Madrid jurisdiction in our Taiwan trademark docketing guide, and the handling is the same: a jurisdiction-level flag that says no central renewal applies, checked whenever an international renewal is processed. Our international trademark renewal docketing guide sets out the wider reconciliation between WIPO cycles and national ones.

There is live reform discussion about Nigerian accession to the Madrid Protocol, and an Industrial Property Commission bill has been under consideration for years. Neither has changed the position. Until accession is in force, docket Nigeria as a national-only jurisdiction.

Nigeria vs United States: The Comparison Table

The fastest way to see why a US-built docket mishandles Nigeria is to put the two regimes in one table. Every Nigerian figure is from the Act or the 1967 Regulations; every US figure is from uspto.gov.

Mechanism	Nigeria	United States
Term anchor	Date of application, deemed the date of registration (s.22(2))	Date of registration on the certificate
First term	7 years (s.23(1))	10 years
Renewal term	14 years (s.23(2))	10 years
Earliest renewal filing	3 months before expiry, and no earlier (reg 66)	1 year before the deadline
Post-expiry window	1 month from the Journal advertisement (reg 69)	6-month grace, computed from the deadline
Recovery after that	Restoration at the Registrar’s discretion (reg 70)	None for s.8 or s.9 — the registration is dead
Periodic use filing	None	s.8 declaration in years 5-6, then with each renewal
Non-use exposure	5 continuous years, measured to 1 month before the application (s.31(2)(b))	3 years of nonuse raises a presumption of abandonment
Opposition window	2 months from publication (s.20(1))	30 days from publication, extendable
Answer to opposition	1 month from receipt, or the application is abandoned (s.20(3))	60 days to answer a notice of opposition, for proceedings instituted on or after 4 September 2025 (previously 40 days)
Madrid route	Not available — not a Protocol party	Available, s.66(a) and outbound
Lapsed-mark citation effect	Deemed on the register for 1 year after removal (s.23(4))	No equivalent provision

Read down the Nigeria column and notice how many of the entries are not just different numbers but different kinds of date. An observed advertisement date, a receipt date, a removal date that matters after the record closes. Those are schema problems, not calendar problems, which is why Nigeria trademark docketing is a poor candidate for the “add a jurisdiction, set the term length” approach.

The US Clocks, Stated Precisely

Because the comparison above is only useful if the US side is exact, here are the US figures as the USPTO states them. These are the clocks a Nigerian matter will usually sit alongside.

Section 8 declaration of use. Due between the fifth and sixth years after the registration date, with a six-month grace period on payment of an additional fee. See the USPTO’s guidance on keeping a registration alive.

Section 9 renewal. The first renewal is filed combined with a section 8 declaration between the ninth and tenth years after the registration date, and every ten years after that — between the nineteenth and twentieth years, the twenty-ninth and thirtieth, and so on. Section 9 renewal is therefore a ten-year cycle, and the section 8 obligation rides along with it.

Section 15 incontestability. Optional, not a maintenance requirement. A section 15 declaration may be filed after five consecutive years of continuous use following registration, where the mark is still in use and there is no adverse decision or pending proceeding. It is commonly filed combined with the section 8 declaration in the years 5-6 window, which is why the two are easily confused — but missing section 15 costs you an evidentiary advantage, while missing section 8 costs you the registration.

Office-action response under the Trademark Modernization Act. The response period is three months from the issue date, extendable once by a further three months on a request filed with the fee, giving six months in total. The extension may be requested only once per office action. Applications with a section 66(a) Madrid filing basis are different: they carry a flat six-month response period and are not eligible for the extension.

Madrid five-year dependency. For five years from the date of the international registration, the IR remains dependent on the basic application or registration. If the basic right falls away in that period, the IR is cancelled to the same extent, and the holder’s remedy is transformation into national applications in the designated states keeping the IR date. After five years the IR becomes independent. Nigeria is outside this system entirely, so a Nigerian national registration is neither exposed to the dependency nor available as a transformation target.

One operational note on the US side, since it changed very recently: post-registration maintenance filings are made through the USPTO’s Trademark Center. If your written procedures still name TEAS forms for section 8 or section 9 filings, that is a documentation update worth making now rather than at the next deadline.

The Eleven Dates a Nigerian Record Must Store

Pulling the statutory analysis into a schema, these are the fields Nigeria trademark docketing actually needs on a record. Four of them are not computable and must be captured by hand, which is the real implementation cost.

#	Field	Source	Computed or observed
1	Application / filing date — the term anchor	s.22(2)	Observed at filing
2	Twelve-month completion review	s.22(4)	Computed from (1)
3	Section 19 publication date	s.19	Observed from the Journal
4	Opposition deadline — 2 months	s.20(1)	Computed from (3)
5	Date the opposition copy was received	s.20(3)	Observed from the file
6	Counter-statement deadline — 1 month	s.20(3)	Computed from (5)
7	Certificate issue date	s.22(3)	Observed — proof only, never the anchor
8	Expiry — 7 years from (1), then 14	s.23(1), s.23(2)	Computed from (1)
9	Renewal window opens — 3 months before (8)	reg 66	Computed from (8)
10	Journal advertisement of non-payment	reg 69	Observed — starts the 1-month recovery
11	Removal date — starts the 1-year citation effect	s.23(4)	Observed

Alongside those, two recurring reviews with no filing attached: a five-year non-use review under section 31(2)(b), and a standing check that the proprietor name and address on the register still match reality, because regulations 67 and 68 send the statutory reminders there.

Where the Ranking Guides Fall Short on Nigeria

We read the pages currently ranking for Nigerian trademark renewal before writing this, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth stating. They are not wrong so much as incomplete in the same places.

Most get the headline figures right — seven years then fourteen appears almost everywhere, and several correctly say the term runs from the filing date. Beyond that the coverage thins sharply. The better pages state a three-month renewal window and a one-month grace but anchor the grace to expiry rather than to the regulation 69 advertisement, which is the difference between a date you can compute and a date you have to watch for.

Several cite only the Act and not the 1967 Regulations, which is where regulations 66 to 71 — the entire renewal and restoration mechanism — actually live. One widely-read page states a six-month late-renewal period that no Nigerian provision supplies. And across the pages we read, none set out the section 20(3) one-month counter-statement deadline with its automatic abandonment consequence, the section 22(4) twelve-month completion trap, or the section 23(4) one-year citation effect after removal.

Those three omissions have something in common: they are the provisions that generate work for a docketing function rather than for a filing function. A page written to answer “how do I renew my Nigerian trademark” can skip them. A system that has to hold a Nigerian portfolio for twenty years cannot.

There is also a naming point worth getting right, since it affects citation. The Act is commonly cited both as Chapter 436 of the Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 1990 and as Cap T13 of the 2004 compilation. Those are the same statute in different consolidations, not two different Acts, and the WIPO Lex record indexes it under the Chapter 436 citation.

A Nigeria Trademark Docketing Audit You Can Run Today

If you hold Nigerian registrations in a system that was designed around US or European anchors, there is a short sequence of checks that will find most of the damage. None of it requires new software.

1. Test the anchor. For every Nigerian registration, subtract the stored expiry date from the filing date. For a first term the answer must be exactly seven years. Anything else — and especially seven years from the certificate date — is a misanchored record under s.22(2).
2. Test the renewal term. For renewed marks the interval from the previous expiry must be fourteen years, not ten. A ten-year interval is the signature of a jurisdiction default that was never overridden.
3. Check the legacy first term. Any registration with a pre-commencement filing date may have had a fourteen-year first term under the proviso to s.23(1). Do not apply the seven-year rule blindly to very old records.
4. Fix the reminder ladder. Remove any Nigerian reminder earlier than three months before expiry from the actionable queue — regulation 66 does not let you act on it — and make sure an actionable date exists at exactly three months.
5. Add the two observed fields. A nullable Journal advertisement date for lapsed marks, and a removal date that survives record closure. Without them the regulation 69 month and the s.23(4) year cannot be tracked at all.
6. Audit the Madrid flag. Confirm no Nigerian record inherits a renewal date from an international registration. Nigeria is not a Protocol party, so any Nigerian expiry that matches a WIPO renewal date was copied, not computed.
7. Check the register address. Confirm the proprietor name and address of record match the current owner, including recorded assignments. The reg 67 and 68 reminders are posted there.
8. Open the non-use reviews. Flag every Nigerian registration approaching five continuous years without stored use evidence, per s.31(2)(b).

The first check is the one to run before the others. It is a single date subtraction across the Nigerian rows, it takes minutes, and in our experience it is where misanchored records show up in portfolios that otherwise look well maintained. A good trademark renewal management process catches it once; getting the anchor wrong costs you for as long as the mark lives.

How PerspireIP Can Help

PerspireIP runs trademark docketing as a managed service for firms and in-house teams whose portfolios cross IPO Nigeria, the USPTO, the EUIPO and WIPO. For Nigerian matters that means the application date is captured as the term anchor under s.22(2) rather than the certificate date, the renewal ladder is built to regulation 66’s three-month ceiling instead of a six-month default, the Journal advertisement and removal dates are stored as first-class observed fields, and Nigerian records are flagged as outside the Madrid System so no WIPO renewal calendar is ever assumed to cover them.

If you hold Nigerian registrations in a system built for US anchors, the single most useful check takes minutes: subtract the filing date from the stored expiry date on every Nigerian row. On a first term the answer has to be exactly seven years. Any row showing seven years from the certificate date, or any ten-year interval on a renewal, is wrong — and it is wrong for the rest of the life of the mark. We will tell you what we find either way.

Frequently Asked Questions