Trademark Maintenance and Renewal “Services”

I’ve previously written about trademark maintenance scams, both here and here.  As a trademark owner, you have a responsibility to maintain or renew your trademark periodically after your mark registers at the Trademark Office.  If you use or used a trademark attorney, your attorney likely advised you of this obligation when your mark registered.  If you did not use an attorney, you may not know about it.  Whether you used an attorney or not, you will probably receive unsolicited mailings requesting that you pay a company to renew your trademark for you.

Many of these mailings will be scams related to trademark maintenance.  The Trademark Office has published articles warning the public about them.  Some of the mail will just be misleading, however.  I received one of these last week and am using it here to explain why it is misleading.  Here is the letter I received:

I’m writing this article on August 12, 2025, and I received this letter around August 5th or 6th.  Some of the information in it is correct and some of it is misleading.

What is Correct?

The letter correctly identifies my address as the correspondence address.  It also correctly identifies the registered trademark and its registration number 6,134,761.  It accurately reports the number and identification of classes (1, 45), the type of mark (service mark), the register (Principal), the filing date (December 11, 2019), the registration date (August 25, 2020), and the trademark application or serial number (88/723,971).

All of this information is correct and publicly available at the Trademark Office.  You can easily confirm by looking up the registration number or serial number via the Trademark Office’s TSDR system at https://tsdr.uspto.gov.

The letter says that a “trademark registration requires a filing between the 5th and 6th years after registration to remain valid.”  This is about 99% correct.  I would argue that to be 100% correct, it would say “to remain in force” or “to remain enforceable” or really “to remain registered,” but not “valid.”  Validity is more about what happened at the Trademark Office during prosecution of the trademark application than what happens after registration.

What is Misleading?

The letter says “Your trademark is about to expire.”  Well, that depends on your definition of “about.”  This particular trademark registration won’t expire until August 2026, which is about one year after I received the letter.  Some might think that a date a year away is “about” to happen, but I don’t, and I don’t believe most people would either.

The letter says “Renewal date: Aug. 25, 2025”.  There really isn’t such a thing as a “renewal date” when it comes to trademark maintenance.  There are renewal deadlines, but not really renewal deadlines.  So, this sentence isn’t technically wrong, but it could be confusing, leading someone to believe that their renewal deadline is August 25, 2025.

Trademark registrations have one-year windows in which you can file the maintenance documents.  So August 25, 2025, is actually the first date in which I can renew my trademark registration.  It opens the window.  But I then have a whole year to file the paperwork, until August 25, 2026.  August 25, 2026, then, is really the renewal deadline.  And in fact, for a fee, I can actually extend this window by another 6 months if I need to.

Now, if the recipient of this letter only reads the “Renewal date: August 25, 2025” line, they might be confused.  If they carefully read the the sentence below this (regarding the 5th and 6th years after registration) and calculate the trademark maintenance dates correctly, then they should understand that the deadline actually isn’t until August 25, 2026.  So I will give this letter credit for allowing the reader to potentially figure out the real deadline on their own.

In the “Important Information” section with the smaller print, the letter says the “renewal fee is $1250 for one class and $650 for each additional class.”  I think this is misleading because we attorneys generally try to break down costs more clearly than this.  I usually tell a client the total fee, what portion is my service fee, and what portion is a government fee.  At the time of this writing, for example, the government fees for a Section 8 renewal of a trademark are $325 per class.  So the letter is charging a premium of $925 on the first class and $325 on all additional classes.  This isn’t correct or incorrect, just not very transparent.