The first day of the AIPPI Trilateral IP Cup in Mexico City brought together intellectual property specialists from the three North American jurisdictions.
AIPPI is the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property, and the trilateral format exists because Mexico, the United States and Canada share a trade framework under the USMCA but not a single set of procedures. Rights holders operating across all three run into that gap constantly.
The sessions worked through practical divergence rather than theory: how each office treats specifications of goods and services, what evidence of use is accepted, how oppositions and cancellations differ in timing and burden, and where a filing strategy that works in one country creates a problem in another.
For a firm whose clients increasingly sell across borders, this is directly useful. A client launching in Mexico and the United States in the same quarter needs a filing plan that accounts for both systems from the start, not a Mexican application followed by an improvised attempt to replicate it elsewhere.
If you are planning to protect a brand in more than one country, the sequence and the wording of the first application shape everything that follows.