Filing a Trademark
Filing a federal trademark application with our firm costs $995 for the filing, which includes the legal fees, costs and time working with you on how to properly categorize the goods or services for your mark. Once filed, the trademark application will have a priority date of the date of filing, but takes six months before the application reaches its first ‘examination’ by the USPTO. Once it is examined, the USPTO will either approve it for publication, or it will be preliminarily rejected. The most common grounds for rejection are: genericness; descriptiveness; or that the mark is too similar to a prior registration. Often such refusals are arguable. If you receive such a rejection, then we bill hourly to present arguments to try to overcome the rejection. Typically such arguments take 2-4 hours (our fees are $250-450/hr).
Trademarks are applied for based on either use or “intent to use.” If you have a product or service already, then we can file based on use. If not, then we must file based on “intent to use” and then later when you have made use of the mark, we file a statement of use ($350) and this will allow the trademark to register. If it takes you a long time to actually get your product or service to market, then we can file extensions of time to file the statement of use. There is a fee for each extension. But, the advantage to filing based on intent to use is that you can lock up protection now for your trademark, and then take up to three years to actually get the product or service to market.
The first step before considering whether to file a trademark is to check to see if there are any other uses of the same mark. If you do this, you can use Google, Yahoo, and free USPTO searches. We can perform searches, which can cost from $400 for a basic search to $2000 for a full search. These are time consuming because we must analyze the marks that are similar to your proposed mark and spend time trying to help you determine if any of these prior users pose an infringement risk to you.