Trademark generates approximately 10 percent of the USPTO annual revenue or about $350M. Compared to patents, this is much smaller, but our data shows that more than 15,000 attorneys work on trademark applications every year. USPTO also employs more than 700 trademark examining attorneys. This week, we are going to look at the 10 most active trademark firms and trademark attorneys based on the filing activity in 2019.

The 2019 Annual Report shows that the USPTO workforce includes 701 trademark examining attorneys which is about 5.5% of its total workforce. Our analysis shows that in 2019 approximately 15,633 attorneys from 10,998 law firms worked with their clients to file 673,233 trademark applications (including additional classes). This indicates that the trademark market is much more fragmented compared to patent as many law firms are active.

We had shown in our Annual Patent Prosecution Report, that the number of active law firms for patent prosecution is approximately 3500. The big difference between the number of patent and trademark firms is mainly because of the limitation imposed by the patent office for patent filing. While any U.S.-licensed attorneys can practice trademark law before the USPTO, when it comes to patents, only those attorneys (or agents) who have passed the patent bar exam can practice patent law before the office.

The following chart shows the trademark application filings by year (the numbers include additional classes)

Our data science team reviewed all filed applications in 2019 in order to identify the top 10 firms by activity. As shown in the following table, LegalForce RAPC Worldwide is the most active firm with 5,003 applications, followed by LegalZoom with 2,281. Both firms have positioned themselves to work with individual and smaller clients.

In the top 10, we only noticed four larger firms: Muncy Geissler, Fross Zelnick, Greenberg Traurig and Kilpatrick Townsend. The last two are among the AmLaw 100.

We further looked at the most active trademark attorneys based on the filing activity. The following table shows the top 10.

          *Currently working at Hiago

In the following weeks, we plan to analyze the trademark data to find the most active companies and then identify the firms that manage the work for those companies. We think companies with more activity usually tend to hire firms that handle more sophisticated work. We also plan to publish some analysis related to district court patent litigation in the last five years as we prepare our first Patent Litigation Intelligence Report for the release in January 2021. Stay tuned.