There are several steps in obtaining a federal trademark registration. Once the Patent and Trademark Office receives your application, it reviews the information to determine if all the requirements are met. After about two months, you should receive a serial number and a receipt for your filing fee. Applications that don't meet the requirements are returned, including the fee. Approximately two months later, an attorney at the office will review your application . If the attorney finds any objections to your application, you'll be notified of the refusal at this time. You might also be asked to make corrections to your application. Minor corrections are often settled with a phone call. Once the attorney decides that your application is correct, the Patent and Trademark Office will send you a Notice of Publication indicating when your proposed trademark will be published in its weekly journal, the Official Gazette. After publication, any other parties who have objections to your mark have 30 days to file an opposition. If you've already used your mark on your product or business, and your mark hasn't generated any oppositions, you should receive your registration certificate about 12 weeks after publication in the Gazette. If, instead, your application was based on the intent to use the trademark, you'll get what's called a Notice of Allowance. This gives you six months in which to either use the mark in commerce or file for an extension. These are minimum time frames. In practice, it could take as much as several years to complete the registration process.
