Home About Us Services Awards Team Insights Career Contact Us TÜRKÇEENGLISH Devin Patent — Istanbul

Devin Patent · Service Areas

Our Services

Eight service areas covering the full life of an industrial property right: searches and filing strategy, prosecution before TÜRKPATENT, international registration through Madrid, the PCT, the Hague System and EUIPO, watch and renewal programmes, recordals, domain names and geographical indications.

Court proceedings and advisory work: Devin Law & IP →

06Recordals, Assignments & LicensingOwnership that is not on the register is ownership you cannot rely on. Transfers, mergers, licences and pledges only take effect against third parties once they are recorded, and a gap in that chain tends to surface at the worst moment - during a sale, a financing round or an enforcement step.

Recordals, Assignments & Licensing

Ownership that is not on the register is ownership you cannot rely on. Transfers, mergers, licences and pledges only take effect against third parties once they are recorded, and a gap in that chain tends to surface at the worst moment - during a sale, a financing round or an enforcement step. We handle the recordal side: the filings, the evidence and the register entry itself.

An assignment agreement binds the two parties who signed it. It does not, on its own, bind anyone else. Until the transfer is entered on the register, the office continues to treat the former proprietor as the owner: renewal notices go to the wrong address, oppositions are filed in the wrong name, and a good-faith third party may deal with the seller as if nothing had changed. We prepare the recordal filing, assemble the signature and authority evidence the office will require, and follow it through to the register entry.

Corporate reorganisations are the most common source of broken title. A merger completes, the trade register is updated, the commercial life of the group carries on - and nobody files the recordals at TÜRKPATENT. Years later the portfolio still stands in the name of a company that no longer exists, and the problem appears when a renewal is refused, an opposition is challenged for standing, or a buyer's counsel runs the chain of title. We reconstruct the sequence from the trade registry gazette and record each step in the correct order.

A licence raises two questions that are easy to answer late and expensive to answer wrong: is it exclusive, and is it recorded. An exclusive licensee who is entered on the register stands in a different position from one who is not, both towards the proprietor and towards infringers; a sole distributor operating on an unrecorded arrangement may find that its position is invisible to the office and to the courts. We record licences, pledges and security interests with the scope, term and territory reflected accurately in the entry.

In an acquisition, the portfolio is worth what the register says it is worth. We verify each right against the official record - proprietor, status, class scope, renewals paid, encumbrances noted - and report the defects that need curing before or at completion. The drafting and negotiation of the underlying assignment, licence or pledge agreement, and any dispute arising from it, are handled by Devin Law & IP at devinlaw.com.tr. What we do on this side is the recordal: taking the executed document and turning it into an entry the register will accept and third parties must respect.

Every change in who owns a right has to reach the register before it means anything to anyone outside the transaction. We handle assignments, partial transfers, mergers, demergers and simple changes of name or address as recordal work: the correct form, the evidence the office expects, the notarisation or apostille where required, and written confirmation once the entry appears.

Assignments & Partial Transfers
  • Recordal of full assignments for marks, patents and registered designs
  • Partial transfer of selected classes or goods within a single registration
  • Division of a registration where only part of the scope is sold
  • Preparation of the assignment deed extract required by the office
  • Notarisation, apostille and certified translation of foreign signatory documents
  • Verification that the assignor on the register matches the signing entity
  • Simultaneous recordal across an entire family of related registrations
  • Confirmation of the completed entry and issue of the updated certificate
Mergers and Demergers
  • Recordal of universal succession following a merger or a demerger
  • Evidence prepared from the trade registry gazette and company records
  • Sequencing of successive corporate changes in their correct historical order
  • Clean-up of portfolios still standing in a dissolved company's name
  • Coordination with foreign counsel for the same change in other jurisdictions
  • Recordal of transfers arising from spin-offs and asset contributions
  • Review of pending files so applications and registrations move together
Name and Address Changes
  • Recordal of trade name changes without altering the underlying ownership
  • Address updates so official notices reach the proprietor in time
  • Correction of typographical and identity errors in existing register entries
  • Updating of representative details when the portfolio changes hands
  • Alignment of the register with the current trade registry record
  • Batch handling of a change across every right in the portfolio
  • Verification that no renewal or deadline is affected by the update
An unrecorded transferThe agreement is valid between buyer and seller. Against everyone else, the register still shows the seller as proprietor, and until the recordal is made the buyer cannot rely on the right in dealings with third parties.
Partial transfers need careSelling part of a class list is not the same as selling a mark. The remaining and transferred scopes must be drawn so that the two proprietors do not end up with overlapping rights in the same goods, which is a dispute waiting to happen.
Mergers surface years laterThe recordal that nobody filed in the year of the merger becomes visible when a renewal is refused, an opposition is met with a standing objection, or a purchaser's counsel asks who actually owns the mark today.
The order of recordals mattersWhere several changes have accumulated, they cannot be recorded as a single leap from the original owner to the present one. Each step is filed in the order it happened, with its own evidence, so the chain reads continuously on the register.

A licence or a pledge changes what other people may do with a right, and the register is where that becomes visible. We record licences with their scope, exclusivity, term and territory stated accurately, enter pledges and security interests for financing transactions, and keep franchise and distribution arrangements reflected in the register rather than only in the file.

Licence Recordals
  • Recordal of exclusive and non-exclusive licences with the scope stated
  • Entry of the licensed classes, goods, territory and term of use
  • Sub-licence recordals where the head licence permits them
  • Amendment of an existing licence entry when the terms change
  • Cancellation of the record on expiry or early termination
  • Coordination of parallel licence recordals at EUIPO and WIPO
  • Review of what the register will and will not accept beforehand
Pledge and Security Interests
  • Recordal of pledges over trade marks, patents and industrial designs
  • Entry of security interests required by lenders in financing transactions
  • Documentation prepared to the standard the office requires for registration
  • Release of the pledge entry once the underlying obligation is discharged
  • Verification that no earlier encumbrance is already noted on the record
  • Recordal of attachments and other restrictions notified by an authority
  • Status reporting to the lender once the entry has appeared
Franchise & Distribution Records
  • Recordal of the trade mark licence underlying a franchise system
  • Entry of exclusive distribution rights where the register permits it
  • Territory-by-territory recordal for multi-country franchise and distribution networks
  • Updating of records as outlets, regions or franchisees change
  • Removal of entries for terminated franchisees and former distributors
  • Consistency check between the recorded scope and the signed arrangement
  • Register position confirmed before a network is expanded or restructured
Exclusive or notExclusivity is not a label; it decides what the licensee may do on its own and what still requires the proprietor. Whether that exclusivity is noted on the register determines how visible the licensee's position is to everyone else.
Why lenders want the entryA pledge that exists only in a contract is difficult to assert against later creditors. Recording it on the register puts the security in the public record, which is usually a condition of the financing rather than an optional formality.
Records have an end dateA licence entry that is never cancelled outlives the arrangement it described. We diarise expiry and termination dates so that the register stops showing a licensee who left the network three years ago.
Drafting sits elsewhereNegotiating the licence or pledge agreement and resolving any dispute under it are conducted by Devin Law & IP at devinlaw.com.tr. Our work begins with the signed document and ends with the entry standing correctly on the register.

Before a portfolio is bought, financed or relied on, it is worth checking that the register agrees with the story the file tells. We verify proprietorship, status and encumbrances right by right, identify the breaks in the chain of title, and set out what has to be recorded to repair them - including transfers by inheritance, which follow their own route.

Portfolio Due Diligence
  • Right-by-right verification of proprietor and status against the official register
  • Check of renewal payments, pending deadlines and files at risk
  • Identification of licences, pledges and attachments noted on the record
  • Review of the class scope actually held against the scope claimed
  • Confirmation that pending applications are included in the transaction perimeter
  • Defect list with the recordals needed before or at completion
  • Post-closing recordal plan covering every jurisdiction in the portfolio
Chain of Title Repair
  • Reconstruction of the ownership history from company and register records
  • Sequential recordal of changes that were never filed at the time
  • Retrieval of missing deeds, gazette entries and corporate resolutions
  • Correction of entries recorded in the wrong name or scope
  • Handling of gaps left by dissolved or liquidated intermediate companies
  • Recordal of changes in the other offices where the family is registered
  • Written confirmation that the chain reads continuously once repaired
Inheritance & Succession
  • Recordal of transfers to heirs on the basis of the certificate of inheritance
  • Registration of rights held jointly by more than one heir
  • Recordal following partition, so each right stands in a single name
  • Continuation of renewals and deadlines while the succession is settled
  • Transfer of a sole trader's portfolio into a successor company
  • Guidance on the documents the office requires from abroad
  • Handling of pending applications where the applicant has died
What a buyer actually buysThe value of a portfolio is the value of what the register confirms. A right recorded in a dissolved company's name, a lapsed renewal or an unnoticed pledge each reduce what is genuinely being acquired.
Repair before it is neededA broken chain is far easier to mend while the companies, signatories and documents still exist. Left until a transaction or an enforcement step, the same repair may require evidence that is no longer obtainable.
Inheritance follows its own routeRights pass to heirs by operation of law, but the register does not update itself. Until the recordal is made on the basis of the certificate of inheritance, renewals, oppositions and transfers all run into the same obstacle.
Diligence findings become a planA due diligence report that only lists problems is half finished. Each defect leaves us with a recordal to file, a document to obtain or a deadline to meet, scheduled against the closing date of the transaction.

Insights on this area

TrademarkTrademark Licence Agreements under Turkish Law: Exclusive and Non-Exclusive Licences Compared28 August 2026TrademarkThe Chain of Title: Why One Unnotarised Assignment Voids Everything After It25 August 2026