Mexico’s Industrial Property Office Has Started to Move. Now We Need to See Whether It Can Sustain It.

The original criticism was not against speed

It has never seemed problematic to me that Mexico’s industrial property system should aspire to be faster. On the contrary. For years, much of the practice before IMPI has consisted of managing waits: waiting for office actions, waiting for decisions, waiting for a file to leave a zone of administrative inactivity.

The problem was not the promise of speed.

The problem was believing that speed, by itself, solved the system.

My criticism of the reform started from a practical suspicion: if an institution is pushed too hard without changing its internal conditions, the response may not be better law, but faster and more fragile law. In trademarks, that could translate into rushed criteria. In patents, into less precise office actions. In contentious proceedings, into more vulnerable decisions. More generally, into an administration forced to close files before having studied them correctly.

They are not the same thing.

What I am seeing in files

That said, something changed.

Since the reform, I have seen office actions issued with unusual speed. I have seen patent grants arrive just days after responding to substantive examination reports. I have seen trademark registrations that had been stalled for some time finally granted. I have seen files that previously seemed frozen suddenly enter a more active dynamic.

This is not an isolated case. I would not yet call it a structural transformation either. But the difference is visible.

There is less dead time.

There are signs of an authority pushing files forward.

In trademark matters, activity appears more constant. In declarations of use and renewals, one can also perceive an intention to organize, clear and move pending workloads. Even the interaction with certain administrative acts feels less static than before.

This matters because the experience before IMPI is not defined only by the law. It is defined by the concrete file, by the office action that arrives or does not arrive, by the decision that appears when no one expected movement anymore, by the platform that works well enough to allow progress, or by the response that stops feeling indefinitely deferred.

Anyone who litigates or prosecutes industrial property knows that an institution’s health is measured in efficiency but, above all, in the quality of its decisions. For a long time, administrative silence was an everyday form of attrition.

Today, at least on certain fronts, that silence seems to have been reduced.

It did not disappear. But it was reduced.

IMPI in the street

The change is not being seen only at the filing window.

There is also a more assertive public presence by IMPI in enforcement. Reports have described actions against counterfeit goods, preventive measures tied to mass events, and a more visible preparation for the 2026 World Cup. Recent coverage documented operations involving unofficial merchandise around a BTS concert, as well as a brand protection and anti-counterfeiting strategy associated with FIFA and the World Cup. That dimension connects with the risks of ambush marketing in Mexico and with the need to review campaigns through a legal marketing framework for the 2026 World Cup.

That detail is not minor.

For years, a recurring criticism of Mexico’s industrial property system was that registration and enforcement moved at different speeds. Registration could be slow, but enforcing the right could be even more frustrating. The authority recognized rights, but its ability to insert them into the real market was limited, intermittent, or too dependent on the individual rights holder’s impulse.

Now one perceives another disposition.

Not necessarily a solution. But a different disposition.

IMPI seems to want to occupy public space, to be seen, to send signals, to say that industrial property does not end with the issuance of a title, but also has consequences before informal trade, mass events, official sponsors, counterfeiting, and the opportunistic use of distinctive signs.

That may be relevant, especially in the context of the 2026 World Cup. The tournament will not only test stadiums, security, tourism, and urban logistics; it will also test Mexico’s rights enforcement system.

And there the question becomes more serious: are we seeing a sustainable institutional policy, or a temporary intensification caused by the calendar?

The improvement is still not a passed test

It is worth not rushing.

An institution can improve during an initial period of political pressure. It can release backlogs, concentrate resources on visible files, increase operations when an international agenda is looming, and produce a feeling of effectiveness for months without that meaning it has solved its problems.

The real question is not whether IMPI can accelerate.

Because speed has a cost when it is not managed well. In industrial property, a fast but weak decision can be worse than a slow one. The first forces the applicant to litigate, correct, challenge, and rebuild the file outside the administrative venue. The second causes attrition, yes, but it does not necessarily introduce a new error into the system.

The point is not to defend slowness. Anyone knows that slowness also harms, costs, and can also become a practical denial of administrative justice.

The point is another: speed only becomes a virtue if it is accompanied by judgment.

In patents, that means technically solid substantive examinations. In trademarks, consistent criteria on distinctiveness, likelihood of confusion, descriptiveness, or bad faith. In enforcement, measures that do not remain at the visual impact of the operation, but are integrated into proceedings capable of surviving review, defense, and eventual judicial challenge.

The operational improvement is welcome.

But we still do not know whether it is a deep improvement or only a superficial one.

Perhaps the problem was never only the law

There is an uncomfortable question behind all this.

For years we have discussed reforms, regulations, deadlines, proceedings, harmonization with treaties, and international standards. All of that matters. The normative architecture matters. A bad legal design can turn a good intention into a permanent problem. That is why the reform also needs to be read together with the new LFPPI Regulation compared with the 1994 RLPI and with the earlier critique of the suit that never quite fit.

But practice often reminds us of something more elemental: many times, the fate of a law depends less on its technical elegance than on the capacity of the institution that must apply it.

Perhaps part of Mexico’s industrial property problem was never only the law.

Perhaps it was execution.

Or, more precisely, perhaps it was the distance between a law that promised rights and an authority that could not always turn them into timely, clear, and enforceable decisions.

If IMPI now manages to move files faster, act with greater presence, and reduce internal inertia, then the discussion changes. It would no longer be enough to say that the reform was deficient. One would have to accept that an authority with leadership, internal pressure, and clear priorities can produce practical effects even within an imperfect legal framework.

But let us not confuse ourselves. That acceptance does not eliminate the criticism.

It makes it more demanding.

Because if the institution shows that it can move, then the bar rises. It will no longer be able to justify itself so easily in historical inertia, it will not be able to say that every backlog is inevitable, and it will not be able to hide behind the system’s complexity.

The moment when we will know whether this was real

For now, my position is deliberately uncomfortable: I still believe the reform carries important risks, but I also believe IMPI is showing a greater capacity to react than I expected.

I do not need to turn that into enthusiasm.

It is enough to recognize it.

The system seems to be breathing differently, but the real test is not in the first months of acceleration.

The real test will arrive when complex conflicts increase, when legal deadlines begin to coexist with technically difficult files, when private parties challenge decisions issued under pressure, when operations lead to long proceedings, or when the 2026 World Cup forces the authority to distinguish between legitimate rights protection, administrative excess, informal economy, ambush marketing, cultural uses, and commercial opportunism.

There we will see whether IMPI only learned to run, or whether it also strengthened its way of deciding.

That is why the current situation deserves a nuanced reading. We are not before a full vindication of the reform, nor before the confirmation of every fear. We are in an intermediate zone, more interesting and more difficult: that of an institution that appears to be working better, without us yet knowing whether that performance is stable, deep, and legally reliable.

Perhaps the suit has started to fit.

Perhaps they are only pulling it hard so it looks like it does.

The difference will not be seen in the discourse. It will be seen in the seams.