What Is the Trademarking Process? | Trademark Factory® FAQ

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What Is the Trademarking Process?

Let me start with the process BEFORE you file your trademark application. Really, the first step is to do a proper trademark search to confirm that the brand that you came up with can be trademarked so that you’re not wasting your time, not wasting your money trying to protect a brand that you can’t own or maybe that you even cannot even use. So start with a search.

Then, you draft the application and you file the application.

Then it’s going to sit in the Trademarks Office for several months without anybody looking at it. So it’s about 8 months in Canada, about 4 months in the U.S. and a little faster in Europe. So nobody is looking at it and then it gets assigned to a trademark examiner. The trademark examiner is somebody at the Trademarks Office who is going to look at your trademark application and they’re going to decide whether they will approve it right away, if everything is perfect, if they see nothing that they disagree with, nothing that they want to re-specify, they will just approve your trademark as it is. In most cases, it’s about 65% of the cases, they will go back to you with an objection, the list of objections, they call them “an office action,” where they’re going to list everything that they don’t like about your application. And it will be up to you (or up to the trademark professionals that are helping you) to address each and every one of those objections. Some of them are easy to address, some of them not so easy. We have several other videos in this series that you can watch to walk you through this.

So let’s say you were able to get your trademark approved, then it will be published in a journal or gazette that publishes every single new trademark application that the Trademarks Office deemed worthy of being approved. The fact of that publication opens a short period of time when anybody can oppose your trademark application and basically ask the Trademark Office not to register your trademark that they thought should be approved. So if there is somebody else out there who has a legal right, who has a legal interest to request that the trademark should not be registered, they can go to the Trademarks Office, show their reasons why they think the trademark should not be registered, and the Trademarks Office will have to consider their argument.

And from here there are two scenarios: You trademark will be allowed in the good-case scenario for you, or it won’t. If it’s not allowed, if it becomes successfully opposed by someone or you decide not to respond to the opposition, then your trademark application is going to die out there.

So, trademark is approved, then it is published, and then, if nobody opposes it, it gets allowed. If it’s opposed, then it goes to the opposition period and after you succeed at the opposition stage, then it get’s allowed.

After it gets allowed, if you filed your trademark application based on existing use or current use, if you’re already using your trademark, then your trademark automatically will be registered. And in Canada, you need to pay a post-allowance government fee for that. In case you filed your trademark application based on proposed use or intent to use, you will also need to file a Declaration or a Statement of Use showing to the Trademarks Office or declaring to the Trademarks Office (again, watch the video about post-allowance Statement of Use) that you started using the trademark that originally was filed based on intent-to-use, and they will say, “Great, now we’re going to register it.”

Now that your trademark is registered, you would think that’s the end of the process but really it isn’t. What happens from there, you need to make sure that you don’t miss deadlines to renew your trademark. The good news is that it won’t be for 15 years in Canada (which term is going to go down to 10 years soon, but still 10 years to make sure that in 10 years you renew). In the U.S., and actually, most countries in the world have just 10 years.

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