Los Angeles – The United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) recently unveiled its Trademarks Dashboard feature which provides a summary of expected time to examine trademarks and other trademark office statistics such as total trademark filings by year.
The statistics show that currently trademark applications are being assigned to examiners and reviewed in a little less three months which is within the stated goal of between 2.5 and 3.5 months. This rate is considerably better than a few years ago when the delay reached 7 months. The overall number of trademark applications filed are on the rise over the last two years with 189,064 applications filed year to date. The increase is one indicator that the U.S. is slowly crawling out of the recession mired years of 2009 and 2010. The trademark dashboard states that it is on pace for a total of 385,000 trademark applications to be filed this year which would be an improvement over the 2009 and 2010 numbers but would fall slightly short of the 401,392 trademark applications filed in 2008.
The dashboard also shows that, as of the end of the second quarter, the total number of active trademark registrations stands at 1,655,542 which is about 200,000 more than the total active registrations at the end of the third quarter in 2008. The statistics also show that nearly all applications are now filed electronically compared to a few years ago when nearly all applications where paper-filed. Of the 189,064 applications filed in the second quarter, a mere 2,629 were paper-filed. For the first time in 2011, now more than 70% of all applications are completely processed online.