Trademark Lawyer Bergen County NJ
If you own a business and have yet to formally safeguard your branding, it’s important to connect with a trademark lawyer Bergen County, NJ businesses rely on. Your company’s name, its logo, its advertising slogans, and all of the other tools you use to identify your identity in the marketplace are intellectual property. If you don’t formally safeguard your intellectual property through the trademark registration process, you will leave your intellectual property vulnerable to infringement and your company vulnerable to intellectual property lawsuits filed by competitors. Especially if your business is small and only operates locally, it can be tempting to forego formalizing your intellectual property rights through the trademark registration process. However, maintaining your competitive edge in the marketplace by asserting a protected company brand and guarding against lawsuits insisting that your intellectual property doesn’t belong to you are worthy investments of your resources.
How Does the Trademark Registration Process Work?
The trademark registration process generally takes several months to complete. Depending on how fast the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is processing applications, it will likely take that agency 3-4 months to review your trademark application once it has been submitted. Obviously, it takes time for our Bergen County, NJ trademark lawyer team to properly draft a trademark application, so you’ll want to account for that preparation time as well when estimating how long it will take to receive your registered mark.
If the USPTO concludes that your mark doesn’t conflict with a mark that it is currently protected and that your application has been filled out properly over the initial 3-4 month review process, your mark will then be subjected to a publication phase that lasts 30 days. It is during this 30 day period that competitors (or any other member of the public) is permitted to formally object to your trademark registration application. Provided that either no one objects or no objections stick your application will then enter the final review phase of the process. If all has gone well and our team will do its utmost to ensure that all does go well you’ll receive your registration certificate shortly thereafter.
Legal Assistance Is Available
Too often, businesses wait until a dispute over branding has arisen to connect with the New Jersey intellectual property team at Kaplan Law Practice, LLC. While we’re certainly happy to be of service when branding disputes arise, we understand that it is in the best interests of companies to avoid such disputes whenever possible. That is why we spend a great deal of our time and energy helping businesses to register their trademarks, secure patents for inventions, and copyright their original works of art and authorship. If you’re a business owner, know that you’ll spend some resources when securing a trademark registration but this investment will help to ensure that your company isn’t deprived of much more significant resources in the event of infringement or a lawsuit down the road. Please allow our Bergen County trademark lawyer team to assist you with your legal needs today; the Law offices of Joshua Kaplan look forward to speaking with you.