       
|
|
|
 |
|
| When you start the process of securing your mark (trademarks and service marks are both referred to on this website as "marks"), you'll need to search and you'll have questions. We discuss the search process elsewhere. We'll talk about those questions on this page. You may have procedural questions, or questions about the law in general, or about the necessity and extent of a search prior to applying for registration of a mark. We hope that we have answered a significant number of those questions with the material on this website. You may have already found other material on the Internet which is a helpful to you. Like everything else on the Internet it is up to you, in the end, to separate the good advice from the bad. The ultimate questions, of course, relate to the odds that the specific trademark you want will be available, whether or not those odds can be improved, whether or not your trademark application will pass muster with the USPTO, and whether or not your mark will infringe someone else's mark. These questions are specific legal questions, and responsible websites acknowledge that those questions must ultimately be answered by an experienced trademark lawyer or law firm. We can give you that kind of specific legal advice. From your standpoint, the question is what you do if the specific legal advice you receive convinces you that you should go no further in the trademark process, for there are definitely cases where the knockout search, the thorough comprehensive search or other considerations dictate that you stop where you are and spend no more. The most obvious cost saving measure is to scrap the application and save the $325 (per class) filing fee with the USPTO. We go a step further and, to our knowledge, we are the only ones who do. We'll advise when your search results have been reviewed, and other legal questions considered, and give you the opportunity to terminate the process. If you decide to stop, we will return $270 of the $695 you have paid to us (we cannot return any money paid for the search since the search is already done. This means that you benefit by our review process either way: if you don't proceed, you limit your cost; if you do proceed, you have the benefit of our evaluation of the odds of success and the measures we take to improve those odds. |
