Trademark Housekeeping
It’s fashionable these days to concentrate on docketing, and rightly so. Answering Office Actions on time, renewing registrations and keeping your clients informed are important tasks, but only part of the bigger picture.
If your clients have multiple marks in multiple jurisdictions you need a record keeping system to drive your docket, and to enable you to provide advice, listings and detailed reports for your clients.
Reliable trademark docketing depends on accurate and complete trademark records.
Record intake
In TM Cloud, record intake has changed from manual data entry to automatic downloads from almost all jurisdictions. Downloading records eliminates typing mistakes and audits the data as it comes in. But there is still room for mistakes to creep in. The data changes over time as well, and needs to be kept up to date. And there is the ever present problem of human error.
If you have a trademark portfolio of more than a few hundred records, you may well have some critical data problems.
Audit reports
How do you know if your trademark records are complete and correct? Good housekeeping and regular audits are the answers.
TM Cloud provides a number of unique audit reports which highlight missing or suspect data.
- Registered trademarks with no renewal date: an important red flag.
- Pending and registered marks with no future docket dates: every active trademark record should have some follow up date.
- Trademark records with no status: most date calculations depend on the status being pending or registered.
- US pending applications with no Basis of Filing: critical data, as without it deadlines and extensions may not be generated.
- Trademark records with no application number: in many online jurisdictions the application number is the web link used to access the Trademark Office data and to Audit the data.
- Trademark records marked as pending, with a registration number or date: the status may need to be updated to registered, to generate the renewal due date.
Many other audit reports are available, to draw your attention to missing data, such as records with no classes, no goods or services, no file references, no case managers, no agents, and logos and design marks with no images.
TM Cloud makes checking your records easy. All of these reports can be run as a batch, to provide a quick health check for your records. We can also clean up your records for you, and provide periodic reports to keep them perfect.
Lastly, the TM Cloud automatic status updates for US applications updates your docket and records for you without any manual data entry.