Trademark Rip-Offs to Avoid

***This article was created for education/informational purposes and should not be considered legal advice. For specific legal questions concerning yourself or your business you should contact an attorney.

1.    Beware of services with low initial charges and inflated fees afterwards

·      Responding to office actions

·      A thorough registerability search

·      Correcting errors

·      Requesting extensions

·      Reporting actions from the examining attorney

·      Status checks

·      Reporting a Notice of Allowance

2.    Responses to Office Action not-included in price

·      Over 70% of trademark applications require a response to an office action.

·      An office action is a request by the USPTO examining attorney for additional information and often includes legal arguments as to why your trademark should be registered.

·      A response often entails legal research, the drafting of legal arguments and specific responses to legal issues raised by the examining attorney.

·      Low-fee services do not include responding to office actions in their services, and will subject you to inflated hourly rates to do so.

3.    Beware of services that will file applications for unregister-able trademarks

·      The “searches” these companies perform are often so basic and bare-bones that they will file a trademark application that is almost certain to be denied.

·      They don’t care à their fee is nonrefundable and then they can charge you to file a new application

4.    Make sure your service or firm offers a money back guarantee

·      After conducting our search (which is free) we will assign your trademark a grade in terms of how likely it will receive registration

                                      i.     “D” – registration is a long shot so if you decide to go through with the registration we will not offer any refund if it gets denied

                                    ii.     “C” – registration is plausible but there are significant challenges in the way. We will offer a 25% refund if the application is denied

                                   iii.     “B” – Registration is likely but there are some minor issues. We will offer a %50 refund if the application is denied

                                   iv.     “A” – Registration is extremely likely. We will offer a 75% refund if the application is denied.