The Trademark Office promised to shave “1-2 weeks” off the waiting time for a registration certificate

The USPTO promised in December of 2021 that the migration from paper to PDF trademark registration certificates would shave off “1-2 weeks” of the waiting time to receive the certificate.  Did the USPTO keep its promise? 

By way of background, in May of 2022, the Trademark Office switched over from paper trademark registration certificates to PDF trademark registration certificates.  The Trademark Office botched the transition, as you can read here.  But eventually the Trademark Office got its internal procedures straightened out and eventually the Trademark Office got back to registering a normal number of trademarks each Tuesday.

Trademark owners had been promised (USPTO Director’s Blog, December 10, 2021) that the transition from paper to PDF registration certificates would reduce how long the applicant would have to wait to receive the certificate.  Here is what the Acting Director said in his blog:

… this new electronic process will benefit trademark owners by providing a more accessible and timely registration certificate – one they will be able to view, download, and print a complete copy of at their leisure. This change will also allow us to issue trademark registrations 1-2 weeks faster than our current process by discontinuing the printing, assembling, and mailing of paper registration certificates upon issuance.

(emphasis added.)  Did this “1-2 weeks faster” happen?  Let’s check.

Back in 2017 (blog article) the delay from “end of opposition period” to “date of grant of registration” was a rock-steady 47 days.

Six days ago was a Tuesday, January 23, 2024.  According to son-of-TESS, about ten thousand registrations were granted that day.  Some spot checking reveals that lots of the applications that got registered had been published on November 7, 2023.  Those cases had an opposition period ending December 7, 2023.  It turns out that the delay has continued to be a rock-steady 47 days.

This suggests that tomorrow (January 30, 2024) might see lots of grants based upon publications that happened on November 14, 2023.

One of our clients has an application that got published on December 5, 2023.  This means the opposition period ended January 4, 2024.  If the rock-steady 47 days persists, we can predict that our client will receive its registration on Tuesday, February 20, 2024.

The answer seems to be “no”, the USPTO did not keep its promise to shave off “1-2 weeks” from the waiting period.  The delay from “end of opposition period” to “grant of registration” was a rock-steady 47 days back when the USPTO issued paper certificates, and the delay from “end of opposition period” to “grant of registration” continues to be a rock-steady 47 days now, with the USPTO issuing only mere PDF registration certificates.