The following is an edited transcript of my video Our Unique Patent Pending Tool at EMP&A.
At our firm, we aim to practice what we preach. We own more than a dozen trademark registrations for our brand, slogans and other creative trademarks, and we recently became the owners of a patent application.
The internal name for this patent pending (as of June 6, 2022) tool is Tracker, because it is our proprietary internal system for monitoring all of our files. Tracker contains thousands of entries and records for all of our client’s trademark filing work. It goes out every night, downloads updates from the USPTO, syncs data, and delivers reports to us so that we can update clients. It manages tasks and deadlines for us and much more—it is essentially our secret weapon, and has allowed us to file and manage hundreds of trademark applications harmoniously every year for more than a decade.
What makes our system different?
- It is exclusive to our firm.
- It is exclusively for trademarks.
- It is built by trademark attorneys.
People have asked me, “What about protecting the Tracker trademark?” Because Tracker is an internal system, essentially like an intranet, it is not really used in a public facing way, and as such does not function as a trademark because it is not indicating the source of something to the public, which is why we have not applied to register the Tracker name.
Tracker’s cousin software, SOFTMWARE®, which is publicly available and does share some functionality, is free at softmware.com.
