The 5 Most Important Reasons of Why You Should Hire an Attorney to Register Your Trademark
You made up your mind. You want to legally own your business. And so you start to dig deeper into the steps you need to follow to register your trademark. You might be thinking, “Why should I hire an attorney to do this? I’m pretty sure I can handle all of this, plus save money by doing it myself.”
If that question is in your mind right now, keep reading to understand the most important reasons why having an attorney will benefit you while you are taking action to protect your trademark.
1. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (the USPTO) highly recommends you hire an attorneyl
Yes, as soon as you start your research, you’ll find that the USPTO highly advises you to have an attorney to help you with the procedure, as they know how long and complicated the registration process can be. Just read this page on their website: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/do-i-need-attorney. If the institution in charge of trademarks says this, you should really consider it
2. The complexity of the before search and preparation
Getting ready to apply takes a lot of time and attention to details, especially when it’s time to conduct the trademark search. And no, it’s not enough to only google your trademark and see if someone already has it.
For example, at Indie Law, we make sure to do a thorough search that includes:
The spectrum of distinctiveness
Trademarks that may be confusingly similar
Trademarks that show up as "dead"
Searching through the USPTO website
3. Create a winning strategy
When you submit an application, it’s not only filling out a form and waiting for your registration to be approved. If you want to increase by 200% the chances of getting your registration approved, you’ll need to make sure to choose the right class and description for your trademark., Again, the details are very important here because there are 45 trademark classes – 34 for goods and 11 for services — and some of them are confusingly similar. So the help of an experienced lawyer will be really helpful if you want to get your trademark.
4. The middle of your registration
As we said in our recent blog post, you’ll be in touch with the USPTO a lot while you are in the middle of the registration process. This is because the USPTO will have several questions for you regarding your application and will likely send you what is called an “office action.” Correctly answering these questions and responding to the office action will be key to successfully moving on to the next and final part of your trademark application. These questions will have a very technical and legal vocabulary that an experienced lawyer can answer in the best possible way.
5. The fees you will have to pay again if anything goes wrong
The process of getting your trademark is one in which you will have to pay hundreds of dollars in fees to the USPTO, even if you don’t hire an attorney. These fees are nonrefundable, so ideally you only do it right once so you don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars extra that you will need to invest back into your business.
What do you think? A more complicated process than you thought, isn’t it? A helping hand is always valuable when it comes to activities that are not completely within your knowledge, and I don’t know if you have heard but trademarks are our jam!
