If you filed a trademark application in Nepal years ago and it's still sitting incomplete, there's a genuine deadline that affects whether it survives at all — and it's easy to miss if you're not actively tracking the filing.
What changed
The Department of Industry reinstated a requirement, after a period of suspension due to political instability, for trademark owners to submit evidence of use within a set period from registration. Alongside this, DOI set specific deadlines for regularizing applications that have been pending for extended periods due to incomplete documentation.
The specific risk for old applications
Applications that have been pending for more than seven years due to incomplete documentation face automatic withdrawal if the missing documents aren't provided before the department's stated deadline. That's not a warning letter or a grace period — it's a hard cutoff, after which the application is simply gone and you'd need to start over from scratch.
Why applications end up in this state
It's rarely a single dramatic failure — usually it's a document request from years ago that never got a response, an ownership change that was never formally updated, or a filing that was submitted and then never actively followed up on as the founder's attention moved elsewhere. Trademark applications don't resolve themselves; an incomplete filing stays incomplete indefinitely until someone acts on it.
The first-to-file reality
Nepal's trademark system operates on a first-to-file basis, not first-to-use — meaning your original filing date is valuable specifically because it's early. Letting an old application lapse to withdrawal doesn't just cost you the processing time already invested; it means re-filing from today's date, potentially behind someone who filed a similar mark more recently.
What to do if you have an old pending application
Check the status of any trademark filing you submitted more than a few years ago and confirm whether it's fully complete or sitting on an outstanding document request. If it's incomplete, treat closing that gap as time-sensitive rather than something to handle eventually — the deadline structure here is specifically designed to clear the backlog. Our trademark registration team can check your application status and handle the missing documents for you., not to wait indefinitely for applicants to circle back.
