Patexia Insight 181: Meet the Top Trademark Attorneys Mastering Trademark Prosecution
Two months ago in late May, we released our third annual Trademark Intelligence Report in an effort to provide invaluable insights into the dynamic landscape of trademark prosecution. This comprehensive report goes beyond analysis and includes statistical data that unveils trends, patterns, and success rates in trademark prosecution. Moreover, it ranks the key stakeholders in the field, including top attorneys, law firms, and companies, offering a definitive guide to the leading players driving trademark protection and enforcement. This week, we will shine the spotlight on a curated selection of exceptional legal minds in the field of trademark prosecution, who have consistently demonstrated remarkable prowess in protecting and advancing the interests of their clients.
Our analysis for this year's report continues to cover a period of five years, specifically from January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2022, just as we did in our previous reports. This allows us to maintain a comprehensive examination of US trademark applications that were concluded within the selected period, ensuring accurate and relevant insights into trademark prosecution activity. Adopting a consistent timeframe for our analysis is also essential because trademark activity tends to fluctuate over time, as demonstrated by the chart below.
The provided bar chart showcases the filing trends of trademarks in the United States between 2018 and 2022. Over this period, a total of 2,939,200 applications were filed and 2,510,218 trademark applications were processed by the USPTO. Notably, there was substantial growth in 2020, with a remarkable increase of 30.54% in filed trademarks. The following year, in 2021, the number of filings remained consistent, experiencing a slight decline of 1.56%. The significant growth in trademark filings observed during this period, as covered in Patexia 137, can be attributed to an influx of anomalous filings originating from China. Moving to 2022, a total of 546,964 trademark applications were filed, indicating a decrease of 19.76% compared to the filings in 2021. The recent decrease in trademark filings, as highlighted in Patexia 176 and Patexia 177, can be attributed to multiple factors such as the decrease in filings from China, as well as a decline in domestic trademark applications. It is worth mentioning that despite the decrease, the filing activity in 2022 remains higher than pre-2020 levels.
During the period of our study, we identified a total of 32,904 attorneys actively involved in the field of trademark prosecution. Their inclusion in our selection below is attributed to their noteworthy activity or exceptional performance, which will be explained further below. It is worth noting that being recognized among the top 500 attorneys out of a pool of 32,904 signifies their membership in the highest echelon, representing the top two percentile of accomplished practitioners in this domain.
| Attorney | Law Firm | Trademarks | Category | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Di Li | 9354 | Most Active | 9 | |
| Louis C. Cheng | Law Office of Louis C. Cheng | 3494 | Best Performing | 12 |
| Rosezena J. Pierce | 2093 | Best Performing | 34 | |
| Ben Natter | Haug Partners | 1114 | Best Performing | 71 |
| Douglas Robert Wolf | 1024 | Most Active | 81 | |
| Janet Cabral Moreira | Maven IP | 847 | Best Performing | 87 |
| Camille Marie Miller | 794 | Most Active | 120 | |
| Catherine Delcin | Delcin Consulting Group | 678 | Best Performing | 123 |
| Joel R. Feldman | 642 | Best Performing | 159 | |
| Andrea Hence Evans | The Law Firm of Andrea Hence Evans | 579 | Most Active | 180 |
| Connie L. Ellerbach | 468 | Most Active | 238 | |
| Daniel P. Mullarkey | Polsinelli | 456 | Most Active | 248 |
| Monica Riva Talley | 416 | Most Active | 283 | |
| William H. Brewster | Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton | 411 | Most Active | 287 |
| Grace J. Han Stanton | 361 | Most Active | 348 | |
| Michael J. McCue | Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie LLP | 295 | Most Active | 500 |
Ranking Methodology
We greatly value the feedback and insights shared by our esteemed IP community, which have played an instrumental role in shaping and improving our evaluation process. By actively incorporating this valuable feedback, we strive to provide a ranking methodology that truly reflects the nuances and dynamics of the trademark prosecution landscape.
This year for the first time, we have implemented a regression model to better understand the factors that contribute to the success of an entity in registering trademarks. This enables us to isolate the effects of key factors, such as the entity's activity level and the probability of trademark registration based on the entity representation or entity being represented. By eliminating external influences, including the examiner's impact, we can provide a more accurate assessment of the performance of different entities in the dynamic trademark prosecution landscape.
Cleaning up entity names in rankings is challenging due to data noise, multiple names for companies and law firms, mergers, and filing errors. Patexia's Data Science team leverages advanced NLP and ML algorithms to enhance accuracy. Addressing these challenges is crucial for accurate rankings. Progress has been made, but improvement continues. In addition to a clean dataset, to ensure comprehensive rankings, crucial parameters must be determined and extracted from diverse stakeholders such as corporations, trademark owners, firms, and attorneys.
When it came to activity, the Activity Score was calculated by tallying the number of registered trademarks obtained by trademark owners, law firms, or attorneys within the study period. To ensure comparability, these scores were normalized based on deviations from the mean and then presented as percentages on a scale of 0 to 100.
Taking into account feedback from our trademark community, we defined Success as a weighted average of the Registration rate, number of Office Actions, and number of Oppositions. However, we recognized that relying solely on success scores for performance rankings would not adequately compare entities with different levels of activity. To address this, we introduced the Performance Score, which considers both success and activity as weighted averages, providing a more comprehensive assessment.
The comprehensive Trademark Intelligence Report covers the top 100 attorneys, law firms, and companies, meticulously ranked based on their activity and performance. Additionally, the report includes a supplementary sheet presenting the top 2,000 most active attorneys, law firms, and companies, accompanied by detailed metrics utilized for evaluating their activity and performance. These metrics encompass a range of factors, such as the number of trademarks filed and registered, registration rates, pendency, office actions, oppositions, extensions, and more. It is these very metrics that formed the basis for generating the rankings, following the ranking methodology elucidated below. Moreover, the report's statistics chapter offers diverse insights into various aspects, including trends, abandonment rates, filings, office actions, pendency, domestic and foreign filings, and more, providing a comprehensive overview of the trademark landscape.
Stay tuned as in the following weeks, we will continue our coverage of this report by highlighting some of the very best law firms and companies, in addition to showcasing some of the best top attorneys in the field of patent prosecution. Through our comprehensive analysis and ranking methodology, we aim to provide valuable insights into the remarkable work and achievements of these legal professionals and organizations in the realm of trademark and patent prosecution.