Trademark Processing

You just filed your trademark. Congrats!
Here is what you can expect next:

Normal Processing

  • Receipt and Publication - Immediately after filing you will have a receipt documenting your claim to the trademark. This documentation will go live on the USPTO database within a few weeks. This may suffice to open an Amazon brand account if needed.

  • Priority - Your trademark receipt alone doesn’t grant you any actual trademark rights, but it does show that you have made an official claim to the name. And your priority to the trademark is stamped at the date of filing, or whenever you first officially used the trademark, whichever came first. So, you are already better positioned to protect your trademark.

  • Processing Times - The USPTO is currently taking around 9 months to review and respond to trademark applications. Once they review your application they will either approve it as-is, request corrections, or reject the application.

  • Approval / Publication for Opposition - If the trademark is approved as-is, then the USPTO will “publish the trademark for opposition”, meaning they will open a 30-day window where anyone from the public can oppose your application if they believe it infringes on their rights. It’s pretty rare to get an opposition at this stage.

  • Registration - Assuming you clear the publication for opposition period, the USPTO will issue you a registration within a few months after that. Or, if you filed on an intent-to-use basis then your registration will finalize after you prove public use. So, the whole process takes a little over a year for a normal application with no issues, or until you prove public use for an intent-to-use application.

Other Responses

  • Corrections - It is not uncommon for the USPTO to respond to an application asking for minor corrections. They may want clarifications on your description of goods and services, updates to your specimen proving use, or they may want you to disclaim an aspect of your trademark. These are all generally pretty easy to respond to without issue.

  • Substantive Rejections - In some instances, the USPTO may reject a trademark application for either (a) being too confusingly similar to an existing trademark on the USPTO, or (b) being merely descriptive of your offerings. If you are working with us, it’s pretty rare that we get these as we generally identify risks like these before filing. But, if this does come up, you will still have an opportunity to respond to try to overcome the rejection.