Docketing is the practice of knowing what every mark owes and when. In most firms it is a job rather than a feature — a docketing specialist reviewing attorney dockets, processing incoming USPTO correspondence, entering the resulting deadlines and chasing the people who have to act on them.
The question worth asking of any system is not what it displays. It is where the dates came from.
Entered, or derived
A docket built by entry is correct on the day it is set up. Someone reads the registration certificate, calculates six years, types a date. From that moment the docket is a historical record of what was true at onboarding.
A docket built by derivation reads the register. The status code, the status date, the registration date, the abandonment date, the filing basis, the section info and the full prosecution history — and recomputes. When an office action issues on a Tuesday, the docket knows on Tuesday.
What Sealvo tracks
- Office action responses — three months or six, decided by filing basis
- Statements of use and extension counts
- Section 8 declarations and Section 9 renewals, including grace periods
- Section 15, flagged as an opportunity rather than an obligation
- Section 71 affidavits for Madrid registrations
- Revival windows — two months, and usually the most urgent thing on the page
- Opposition answers
A docket is not a list of dates
The moment more than one person is involved, the questions change. Who is responsible for this one. Has anyone dealt with it. What happened last time. A system that answers only “when” leaves the rest to memory.
Each obligation can be assigned, acknowledged, completed and reopened, and keeps its history. The same docket publishes as a calendar feed and a PDF report, because the person doing the work and the client paying for it want the same information in different shapes.
Seeing a docket before you have one
Because deadlines are derived from the register rather than from imported records, a docket can be computed for any attorney of record on the public register — including before anyone has signed up or entered a single mark. That is unusual, and it is the most honest demonstration we can offer: not a sandbox, your own portfolio.