Trademark Registration
Protect Your Brand with Cook Alex
Why Register Trademarks?
Trademark registration is essential to protect your business, services, and products—both in Illinois and nationwide. It gives you the exclusive right to use, license, and enforce your mark, ensuring your brand stays protected from infringement.
Partner with a Trademark Lawyer: Cook Alex
Registering, maintaining, and protecting trademarks feels like a daunting task. But you don’t have to do it alone!
Working with Cook Alex provides you with an arsenal of tools, resources, and extensive knowledge of trademark and intellectual property (IP) law. We make every step of the way manageable and simple. Giving you the freedom to focus on other parts of your business. While we protect your intellectual property.
Cook Alex helps you with every part of your trademark registration, maintenance, and defense.
Trademarks are Key in Your IP Portfolio
Trademarks are invaluable to your business. They are a way for your customers to recognize your goods and services, to build trust and loyalty. With an established trademark, you can confidently grow your brand and gain competitive advantages by making it easier for customers to recognize and choose your brand.
Let’s build our relationship today;
contact us for a complimentary consultation to get started.
While Cook Alex would be pleased to discuss your legal needs, please understand that merely contacting us does not create an attorney-client relationship. Additionally, please do not send us any confidential information unless we have agreed to be your attorneys and represent you.
The Trademark Registration Process: How Our Attorneys Help
Getting a trademark is an involved process that can take months, sometimes years, but you don’t have to do it alone. Cook Alex is ready to help you at every step of the trademark registration process.
1. Identify Your Trademark
It is important to understand your IP to ensure protection. Trademarks protect brand names and logos that identify goods and services from a particular source.
A trademark can protect a variety of formats:
- Standard Characters: Used to register words, numbers, letters, or a combination of, without any particular font or formatting.
- Special Characters: This format serves trademarks that have a design element or a particular style.
- Sound: Used to protect specific sounds that are linked to a specific brand.
Once you identify your mark, ensure that it meets the trademark requirements, as not everything falls under trademark law protection.
2. Trademark Research
This is a critical step in your trademark registration process. Having a mark that is similar or identical to another trademark will likely cause an application to be denied.
To avoid infringement, ensure that your mark is unique enough to be trademarked.
3. Prepare and File Your USPTO Application
First, you must create a USPTO.gov account to gain access to all application materials. This gives you everything you need to begin and monitor your application.
There, you can complete and submit your application, and pay any applicable fees.
4. USPTO Examination and Office Actions
A USPTO examining attorney reviews submitted trademark registration applications and ensures the application meets the minimum requirements. This may take a few months.
The examining attorney checks your application for compliance, verifies fees, and searches the USPTO database for potential trademark conflicts.
If there are issues that determine your mark should not be registered, the USPTO will issue an office action letter outlining the reasons for refusal. If minor issues or corrections are needed, the reviewing attorney may contact you by phone or email.
For any office action correspondence, you must respond within three months of the issue date, or the application will be declared abandoned. An optional three-month extension may be requested for a fee.
5. Publication & Opposition
Publication
If the USPTO attorney raises no objection to your trademark registration, or if all objections are overcome, the mark is approved for publication in the Trademark Official Gazette, allowing for public opposition.
Opposition
After your trademark is published, third parties have 30 days to file an opposition if they believe it may be damaged by the registration of your trademark.
6. Trademark Registration and Ongoing Maintenance
Registration
The USPTO registers the trademark and issues a certificate with the intent of use for the mark.
Maintenance
Trademark maintenance is critical to avoid cancellation. You must file specific maintenance documents, such as Declarations of Use and Renewal Applications, at regular intervals with the USPTO. A trademark attorney at Cook Alex can monitor these deadlines and ensure continued brand protection.
Work With a Cook Alex Trademark Attorney
A Cook Alex trademark lawyer can prepare, file, and handle any interactions with the USPTO in your stead. We leverage decades of experience, ensure your trademark registration meets all requirements and get ahead of any potential issues.
Our team has decades of experience serving a domestic and international client base. We are familiar with Illinois trademark registration requirements and ensure a smooth process.
Benefit from our full-range of intellectual property and technology-related services. Our depth and breadth of technical, legal, and industry knowledge can transform your ideas, thoughts, and creativity into competitive advantages.
Illinois Trademark Registration Services: Local Expertise in Chicago & Naperville
Phone: (312) 236-8500
Fax: (312) 236-8176
E-mail: Firm@CookAlex.com
200 West Adams Street
Suite 2004
Chicago, Illinois 60606
Phone: (312) 236-8500
Fax: (312) 236-8176
E-mail: Firm@CookAlex.com
2020 Calamos Court
Suite 200
Naperville, IL 60563
Ready to grow your business and strengthen your brand?
Ready to protect your brand through trademark registration? Call (312) 236-8500 to speak with an experienced trademark attorney at Cook Alex or fill out the form found on this page. Our team offers trusted intellectual property law guidance across Illinois and beyond.