The following is an edited transcript of my video Data Demonstrates the Value of a Trademark Attorney.
A recent study titled A Tale of Four Decades, Lessons from the USPTO Trademark Prosecution Data by Deborah Gerhardt and Jon Lee, dives deep into data from the USPTO and shows some of the history of relevant data about trademark applications and registrations over the last four decades (1981-2020). Published by INTA in their journal The INTA Reporter, you can find it for free online.
I was pleased to see the following empirical data that working with a trademark attorney improves the odds of success for a trademark application.
- When someone filed without an attorney, their application was approved on average 63% of the time. That number shot up to 81% of the time when working with an attorney.
- The more experienced the attorney was, the greater the level of success, and the bigger the difference.
The data showed attorneys between 0-10 trademark filings, 10-30 trademark filings, 30-100 trademark filings. For each level of experience, the success rate rose, including those over 100 applications. What would the success rate be for those like myself, with thousands of trademark applications under their belt?
It helps to work with an attorney; clearly, it helps even more to work with an experienced attorney. As the article explains, decades worth of trademark application data supports this conclusion.
