To answer and reply the questions and requests from Japan Patent Office

In the process of examination of your trademark application, there may come questions or requests to ask you explain something or to submit additional documents.

If you can’t do it correctly, your application may be rejected.

Then, the first question is, if you can read the documents from Japan Patent Office correctly?

It’s necessary to read the document several time and check the point (or the questions, requests) on the internet to confirm the points, even you can read Japanese very well.

The second question is that, if you can reply or submit the correct document correctly?

If you can’t reply correctly or submit the document correctly, then the application will be stopped and take much more extra time.

By relying on patent attorney, the problems in this part can be controlled easier.

Disadvantages of using patent attorney

It takes money.

Not even necessary to say this.

There may be different patent attorneys and some may charge you step by step in the application procedure and some may charge you only after the trademark is registered successfully.

The other problem is that it’s actually quite difficult to recognize the quality of patent attorneys.

Since patent attorney is kind of service profession, we can reasonable think that the price is somehow related to the quality.

But since trademark registration applications all aim at the same goal: trademark registration, cheaper price is always welcomed.

Then, the problem is, how cheap and how expansive should I spend and choose a patent attorney?

Why I didn’t use a patent attorney?

I want to save money, of course.

I thought that it’s nothing but trademark registration. Then why should I spend 30000~60000 YEN for such a procedure?

(This price is simply the service fee for patent attorney, not including the fee for Japan Patent Office.)

Besides, all registered trademarks are opened on the database online on the website of Japan Patent Office and I can search for similar trademarks by myself easily.

I assumed that if I learned a bit on the internet about how to do overall research on trademarks, then it should be OK to do this trademark research by myself.

So I decided to apply for trademark registration by myself.

First step: trademark investigation

The first step in the whole trademark registration application procedure is to do trademark investigation.

You need to confirm that there are no any registered trademark that is exactly the same to what you plan to register and in the same classification which you plan to designate.

※If you don’t know classification of trademark, please Google it.

If there are already registered trademark that is exactly the same to the one you plan to register, then you can only change your trademark you plan to register.

If there are some similar trademarks existing, the fewer the easier that you can make your trademark registered.

This process is the most important, so do spend time on this.