Elevate Your Trademark Assignment Agreement with Legitimate eSignature in the United States

How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimateness for Trademark Assignment Agreement in United States

hey this is attorney elizabeth potts weinstein and today we're going to talk about how to file your own trademark application with the united states patent and trademark office including a step-by-step tutorial of exactly how to do it on the uspto.gov website in this video i'm assuming that you already have most of the stuff put together for your trademark application and you're ready to go if you don't have that stuff done check out this playlist and you will get all the step-by-step bits of informations and decisions you need to have already done before you get started with your filing so the first thing to do is to go to the uspto.gov website here we have the website for uspto.gov united states patent and trademark office if you go under trademarks you can go to apply online under apply online are a bunch of different categories for forms now if you're just filing for the first time you're going to be doing the initial application form but there's also all the other forms are accessible here so if you need to respond to something from the trademark office file your intent to use forms which i will talk about later change your address any of that kind of stuff you can find those forms here so you're gonna go to initial application forms now with the united states patented trademark office there's one online application system but you have two different categories of filings one is the plus and the other is the standard there's a number of differences between them but the biggest difference besides one of them being less expensive than the other is that with the plus you have to select from a list of classes and with the standard you can make up your own class or description of your products and services i highly recommend that if it's at all possible you select the plus not just to save money but because if you are picking your class from a list of classes you're going to have formatted it correctly and also will make it much faster and easier for them to approve your application the only time we really use this standard is if what my client is doing we just can't find anything on the list that is even remotely applicable or we're applying the united states basing it upon a foreign application from another country and their descriptions are so different we want to use their descriptions here in this filing to the extent possible there are also additional statements that are required in the plus application that you must make at the time of application the ones that typically come up the most are the name of a living person or that your trademark includes reference to a specific geographic area so i can file a trademark with my name in it however i have to give permission to myself to file that application so this is something to be aware of if you're doing a plus application this list also applies to you not just the class selection so let's say we're ready to apply so we're going to start the application the next thing you're going to need to do is to log in if you don't have a login and email for the uspto.gov then you can create one otherwise you need to log in with you log with an email address a password they also have a second level of authentication the next screen you come to is the beginning of the application there is a video that you can watch i recommend doing that because it's always great to get more information and this is a dynamic application so when you select things it will change what the next questions are also be aware that if you have inactivity it will log you out you can save your session though and come back to it later and that's what this is about if you save your session then you have to upload a file to create it back in so here i'm going to pretend that i'm not an attorney filing the application i'm going to pretend that i'm doing this myself and i'm gonna pretend i'm doing a t e t e a s plus application so the first screen is who is the owner of this trademark now if you are a sole proprietorship then or you're filing as an individual inventor then it will be you but if you have an llc or a corporation it'll probably belong to that business instead of you personally so let's say my i have a llc called potsfeinstein llc and that's going to be the owner of the mark then i click limited liability company for the entity type and it's going to change what some of these questions are so it will take a minute to load now i have to select what state it's in or if it's not in the u.s then you select this sometimes i run into an issue where someone has a business that's from another country and so they so their entities are have different names but the trademark office does have places for you to put that information to now we're going to put the mailing address main street this is a made up address well it might actually exist but that's not my address okay now domicile address this is something that's very important for anybody who is using their mailing address that's not your physical location you have to have a physical location address in here this physical location address will not appear on the publicly available database so you don't have to worry about that from a privacy perspective but you have to have an address so they know that you're physically located here in the united states if you are not physically located here in the united states then you're gonna have to have an attorney who's located here to represent you i don't necessarily think that rule is fair but that's just the rule so let's assume that this is actually my physical location you can put in a phone number and fax number you don't have to put in a phone number but sometimes the trademark examiner will call you because you messed up something your application that is relatively straightforward to fix so if you don't put a phone number in here there's nobody they can call they might email you but some examiners are not into email otherwise they'll have to issue an office action which is a lot more complicated so i'm going to put in an email address this is my business email address you can also put in the website for your business i recommend doing this so when they do a search and you come up for your own trademark they know that it's you so i'm gonna put in my website address then i hit continue it's going to look at everything i filled out and give me information about things that i missed or i messed up in the filing so it tells me that i did not enter a telephone number i'm just going to skip it for right now but generally i'd recommend putting in one it does not get listed publicly so you don't have to worry about that now i can finally put in my trademark so i'm going to use the trademark that we talked about in one of the other videos which is irene whoops i on the trail this is a person who has a business about hiking irene is not this person's name irene they're using as an abstract concept now here's special standard characters special form sound mark those are the different kinds of trademarks so a special form a lot of times would be a logo i'm not going to go into sound marks that's fairly rare for someone to do but that would be like the little you know dinging noises and little musical noises that are associated with a brand so now i'm going to go to the goods and services information this is the class that you're using for your trademark i have a whole another video about how to pick your class we're going to add the class this is the same database that i refer to in the other video so let's say this person does group coaching so we search for group coaching and a bunch of things come up there's going to be some that are like already written out really special those are rarely going to apply to you in your particular situation because they're written for like one trademark applicant then there's going to be one that's the general one so here we're talking about providing group coaching in the field of and then we indicate field or subject matter so we're going to insert that but we have to actually give it what the field of is and here we're going to talk about hiking and so we're going to put in the field of hiking and over landing okay so we're going to insert those checked entries and then when we get back to the next screen we're gonna make sure it's there still okay providing group coaching in the field of hiking and over landing technically it should be fields with an ass they'll fix that later don't worry so now we have to decide what is the basis of our filing the basis is you have to use a trademark in commerce in the united states and interstate commerce specifically which means commerce in more than one area over state lines for it to be trademarkable you don't have to do that on the day that you're filing because it can be an intent to use this in commerce application you gotta know if you're doing intended to use it or you're already dead we're gonna assume in this case that someone already has been using it so that's section 1a or to use already using mark in commerce now at this point we have to give a specimen which is the example of how you're selling your product or service with the trademark in conjunction with it and give them the data for sale so i just printed out a pdf from my website which is actually not related to hiking at all but to give you an example of what an acceptable specimen would be if you're selling services like in this case group coaching you need to have a specimen that shows you offering your services for sale with a call to action so for example i have a pdf i have a pdf here that's a printout from one of the pages on my website where i'm offering 15-minute quick calls with me and i describe what those are and what someone can get out of them and then i have a call to action of contacting me messing me messaging me about a quick call the call to action doesn't need to be where someone buys it directly from your website it can just be that they can call you a phone number a form for them to fill out you could uh it's something like that but in my case it gives them a form to fill out that pops up in this you want to make sure when you do a print from a web page you want to make sure that you include the graphics because a lot of times your use of your trademark will be somewhere in the graphics it gives a lot of context and also you want to have the headers so it says the website at the bottom where it was printed from and the date that you printed that from the website and you attach it and then you want to make sure that it actually worked because occasionally it won't work the files typically you're going to want either a jpeg or a pdf for websites i usually print a pdf if it's something that's a product so i've taken an actual photo of it i use a jpeg so i'm going to click on this which will open in a new window to make sure that it actually uploaded and there we go looks great everything looks fine now it already was attached and i returned to the form okay it says one file attached to make sure it's there you can actually attach multiple files so it may be that instead of doing it as a pdf it just sometimes if you print as a pdf it's very wonky instead you can take jpegs of every single part of that sales page and attach it all together so description of specimen i usually put something like you have to put the actual website where you printed and you have to put the date which is i'm doing the date when this was selected you can add more urls and dates and then you would put the date of the first using the mark anywhere and in commerce so anywhere means you made a sale in australia and then if that was before your first date in interstate commerce in the united states and then this is your date a first sale in the united states so i'm just going to say that i sold this same time oops january 1st which is highly unlikely but let's say i did that so now i can assign the filing basis oh it does never likes how i type things in the specimen description and like always always give me this area it's usually about a comma or period so there we go providing group coaching in the field of hiking and over landing and then the assigned basis is here now we can continue so here we can give correspondence information if you have some kind of internal docket number you can put that here but you probably don't this is your first trademark here you can put in secondary email addresses so if you have a gmail address or some other personal address i recommend putting that in here but that will be in the file all right so now we're at the fee information number of classes one fee for class 250. so if you filed in multiple categories multiple classes it will be 500 750 et cetera but it really does depend upon your goals in your business obviously your budget and how worried are we that this trademark will be denied because sometimes we can get it denied it'll be denied in one category and will be accepted in the other and we'd rather have those be completely separate by the way if you file multiple trademarks in the same day or even a couple days apart and therefore the same trademark condition different classes they'll be all looked at by the same examiner even if you don't file them literally together now you're going to make a declaration this is under penalty of perjury that you believe the applicant is the owner of the trademark that you've been using in commerce that's in connection with these goods and services to the best of your knowledge and belief everything in the application is accurate also that there's nobody else who has any rights they are legit that after a inquiry there's evidence you support for everything you said like for example the data for sale sometimes i have clients where i'm filing a trademark for them like today or here in 2021 but they actually their data for sale is a long time ago it's the late 1990s in that case we need to know that there's some evidence of that data for sale there's some email there's some invoice there's some statement that can prove up that date of first sale and so i have my clients go find that they don't include that but you need to know that it exists and that everything's under a penalty of purging then you do your signature i use you can just do epw or whatever your initials are obviously you don't do epw you do your own initials your name and then your position so since i'm filing for an llc i do whatever is my title for the llc so i might do president of president or i could do principal i could do man you know manager or whatever my title is and then a place to put your phone number when you hit validate you're validating the application under penalty approachery they want you to put the phone number but you actually don't have to i usually do actually put a phone number okay so i'm actually not going to keep forward with this application since it's a pretend application but in this place you have you have a chance to check all of the data so i recommend opening this in another and then you go through everything you file to make sure it's correct if you need to file any additional statements you need to go back and do that i always open it in its own tab because i've had problems where it didn't work when i tried to go back and then here this whole note you have to read this all and click if that you have read it i'm not going to pay submit obviously but then you'd hit the pay submit button and you can pay by credit card i typically use an american express but you can use a visa or mastercard once you've filed your application now you're going to wait you should get a receipt right then with ha that has yours the serial number of your application and also everything that you filed you'll get that after you pay on the website as well as via email then you're gonna wait for at least three months if not seven months which is what it's been lately because of the situation and then the trademark office will take some action and the action could be that they approve it and it goes through down that road or it could be that there's something wrong with it that's either a minor you need to fix or a big deal and they actually do an office action but either way it's going to take months before they do anything replication and i highly recommend that you check on it on a regular basis again this is attorney elizabeth potts weinstein if you have any questions about filing your own trademark application feel free to ask them below and i'll try to point you in the right direction thumbs up if you found this video helpful and subscribe if you like more tips or strategies about trademarks or other aspects of small business law like contracts forming analyses all that kind of stuff i'll see y'all later bye