ForumsLegal and Insurance

Yes, you can do it yourself. An attorney is not required.

Start at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website: http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm

The registration process will take at least a year (and probably three or four years, in my experience).

The USPTO website has a complete fee schedule.

Your starting point is the US goverment. You can visit their website in the address provided above. I recommend calling the government and talking with a representative in the Patent and Trademark office. This is always a good starting point.

You should also get a free or 30 minute consultation with a trademark and patent attorney. This will help you understand more of the process. It is the goverments job to explain the process to you. That's what our tax dollars are paying for.

Good luck!

Thank you for your suggestions.

Dear score81:

No problem at all, you are very much welcome. That is what we at I INC YOU, Incorporated are here for, to provide accurate and affordable assistance and help!

Nathan A. Green
Co-Founder & Incorporation Specialist
I INC YOU, Incorporated / www.iincyou.com
1-888-I-INC-YOU (446-2968)

Very good question, DDiva -- I look forward to the answer.

To qualify my earlier "you can do it yourself" post: I have completed 17 registrations myself (most of them submitted on-line) with no attorneys and no legal problems -- but all of these were either "arbitrary" or "suggestive" names for business and industrial processes, with no symbol or graphics involved. Likewise, the purpose of these trademarks was to "brand" the process as unique in order to facilitate its licensing and implementation, not to use the name in consumer advertising (at least, not initially -- very similar to how Teflon® was registered 15 years before it found its way to consumers products).

Lengthy delays occurred when another enterprise in a totally unrelated field happened to choose the identical name for one of their processes. In one case, the name we "brain stormed" for a safety procedure in Nevada was the same as the name of a fund raising process for a philanthropic group in NorthCarolina, a religious program at a megachurch in Oklahoma, a newly-invented water treatment process at a lab in New York, and an economic development model for an organization in Washington DC. None of us had any "hits" when the searched various databases for the name because we all apparently "created" it and filed within six weeks of each other! These kinds of conflicts happen more often than you might imagine, and may take months (or even years) to resolve.