USPTO is closed today, Monday, March 17 as a snow day.
Anything that you might have needed to file today to meet a USPTO due date may be postponed until tomorrow, Tuesday March 18. But there are some things to watch out for.
Best Practice: using USPTO’s Financial Profile system
USPTO has many e-commerce systems that are well known to practitioners and applicants — EFS-Web for e-filing patent documents, TEAS for e-filing trademark documents, ESTTA for e-filing TTAB documents to name three examples. But I find it remarkable how few practitioners and applicants know anything about USPTO’s Financial Profile system. The Financial Profile system is (or should be) a central part of the bookkeeping workflow for any patent firm or trademark firm and for any corporate patent department or corporate trademark department.
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USPTO will be closed Monday, March 3
USPTO will be closed Monday March 3.
Anything that you might have needed to file on Monday March 3 to meet a USPTO due date may be postponed until Tuesday March 4.
Monitoring the international trademark filings of your competitors
Many companies, and many trademark practitioners, are unaware of an extremely helpful service which the World Intellectual Property Organization makes available free of charge. The Madrid Electronic Alert (“MEA”) system is a free-of-charge “watch service” designed to inform anyone interested in monitoring the status of particular Madrid Protocol (international) trademark applications. This is particularly helpful for monitoring Madrid Protocol trademark filings of competitors and adversaries.
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USPTO’s trademark Post Registration Division
The first US trademark application I ever filed on behalf of a client was in 1996. In the seventeen years that have passed since then, I’ve seen ups and downs in various parts of the trademark office. Many parts of the trademark office do very well. But this post observes a few lapses in the Post Registration Division (“PRD”).
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