Yesterday (blog article) I reported half a dozen US trademark applications that had been filed as much as 2½ years ago and still did not have an Examining Attorney. Here are five more US trademark applications that were filed a long time ago and still do not have an Examining Attorney:
| Application Number |
Filing Date |
| 90824061 | 12 July 2021 |
| 90833853 | 16 July 2021 |
| 90833862 | 16 July 2021 |
| 90833857 | 16 July 2021 |
| 90849560 | 26 July 2021 |
(In the table, I have provided a deep link to the TSDR page for each of these five applications.)
As you can see, these applications were all filed at about the same time, more than eleven months ago. The Trademark Office acknowledges a backlog of six or seven months, but eleven months is a lot more than six or seven months. I hope and trust that some reader of this blog article who works in the Trademark Office will pass along these five application numbers to whoever it is that is responsible for assigning Examining Attorneys to trademark applications.
Here is something to puzzle over. It will be recalled (blog article) that in August of 2021 I did a couple of mouse clicks and found some 2300 trademark applications whose applicants were located in a particular mail box at this mail box rental store in Colorado Springs. I sent a spreadsheet to the office of the Commissioner for Trademarks at that time, listing those 2300 applications. The thing to puzzle over is that these five trademark applications were listed in that spreadsheet.
Today’s blog article is thus the second time that these five US trademark applications have been brought to the attention of the Commissioner’s office.
I wonder if the PTO isn’t investigating these applications and took them out of the regular queue. I pulled up three of these parks in TSDR, and all have the same counsel, and in each of them a change of responsible attorney was filed in November.
Change of attorney, yes, but not a change of the firm. It is merely a different attorney at the same firm.
Yes, still the same firm, but the reason for the change seems very odd—that the original attorney had a potential conflict of interest. How would such a conflict not affect the entire firm?
Yes, it does seem odd. One also recalls 37 C.F.R. § 2.23(d) and TMEP § 108.03 which require the attorney to check the status of a pending case no less often that every six months, making inquiry at the Trademark Office for corrective action as needed. Nothing in any of the five application files shows any indication of such inquiry.
The plot thickens. Looked up Kevin Gallagher, the new listed attorney for these apps, and he IS admitted in Massachusetts, but according to his listing he is in-house counsel and so does not have malpractice insurance: https://www.massbbo.org/s/attorney-lookup?fName=KEvin&lName=Gallagher&loc&bboNumber
So maybe the OED is investigating why an in-house lawyer would be taking over multiple trademark applications seemingly owned by different entities?
Yes, and assuming that the Kevin Gallagher that you found is the right one, his address is on Cedar Street in Warwick, Rhode Island. Yet the office address for Daisy IP (where he supposedly works) is 64 Bank Street in Abingdon, Massachusetts. Here is a fun thing to see — looking in LinkedIn, it looks like Mr. Gallagher is an employee of the Department of Commerce! Who would have guessed?
Interesting. The Mass bar says that he is either a Gov’t employee or in-house counsel, so that makes sense. I wonder if he is, in fact, the Kevin Gallagher listed in the TSDR records, and if so, if he is aware that he is TM counsel for multiple applications?
A few mouse clicks in TESS reveals that Mr. Gallagher is apparently the attorney of record on some 3900 US trademark applications. Most, but not all, have applicants located in China. I spot-checked a few dozen of them, and several cases had some document or another in the file indicating that the Trademark Office thinks there is something amiss about the circumstances of the filing. It would not surprise me a bit if it were to turn out that some wrongdoer appropriated Mr. Gallagher’s bar credentials for these applications. I am going to load the most recent 600 of the applications into my IP Badger to see what happens to them.
And the address for Daisy IP, the listed firm, is a 1,053 square foot condominium. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/64-Bank-St-Abington-MA-02351/63710668_zpid/ It could be a home office but it seems unlikely that multiple attorneys would work there.