Alt Legal's own company timeline records TM Cloud docketing customers being offered individual, no-cost migration to Alt Legal in 2023. A similar move followed with WeberMark customers in 2024.
Acquiring a competitor's customer base has been a recurring part of how this market consolidates — which is worth knowing when you choose where to go next.
What to ask before any migration
The question that matters is where the new system gets its dates.
- Imported from the old system. Then every error in the old docket is faithfully reproduced in the new one, and the migration has moved the problem rather than fixed it. Nobody finds out until a date is wrong.
- Derived from the register. Then the import is a list of marks, and the deadlines are recomputed from USPTO data — which means a migration is also an audit.
We would ask that of us too. A system that computes from the register will occasionally disagree with the docket you are leaving, and those disagreements are the most valuable output of the whole exercise.
Two trademark-only products, compared properly
Most comparisons on this site are between a trademark tool and a broader IP suite, where the answer turns on whether you file patents. This one does not. TM Cloud is trademark software built by people who know trademark practice, so the easy differentiators are gone and the comparison has to be made on something narrower.
The narrow thing is where the dates come from. A docketing system in the established sense is a system of record: deadlines are entered — by a docketing clerk, from a USPTO notice, at the point a matter is opened — and the software stores, sorts and reminds. Done attentively this works, and has worked in firms for decades. Its accuracy is the accuracy of the entry, and its blind spot is anything that changed after the entry was made.
The alternative is to compute the obligations from the register each time rather than store them. The register already knows the registration date, the status code, the filing basis and the prosecution history, which between them determine every statutory clock. Nothing has to be entered because nothing is being remembered.
What that difference shows up as
It shows up on the marks nobody has looked at. A stored docket is complete to the extent that every mark was correctly entered when it arrived — which is a strong assumption across a portfolio that has absorbed lateral hires, client transfers and a few years of staff turnover. A computed docket has no such dependency: a mark that was never entered still appears, because it is in the register.
It also shows up when something posts. If a Section 8 was accepted last week, a computed docket stops showing it as due the next time it reads the register. A stored docket shows it as due until somebody closes it out, and a docket full of stale items is one people stop reading carefully.
Neither approach is automatically right. If your entry discipline is genuinely good — a dedicated docketing professional, a documented intake process, a periodic audit — a system of record does the job, and that is a legitimate choice rather than a compromise. The question is whether that discipline actually exists, or whether it existed when the system was set up.
Where the market stands
Alt Legal is the largest and best-reviewed option. DocketTrak and AppColl cover patents alongside trademarks. Anaqua serves corporate departments. The table compares all of them.