Patexia Insight 191: Top Law Firms in Trademark Prosecution 2023
In the dynamic realm of intellectual property, the importance of trademarks cannot be overstated. They serve as the bedrock upon which businesses build their brand identities, establishing trust and recognition among consumers. To navigate this intricate landscape, legal professionals and law firms play a pivotal role, offering their expertise and guidance in trademark prosecution. Each year, Patexia's Trademark Intelligence Report serves as a beacon, illuminating the trademark landscape by evaluating and ranking stakeholders, including attorneys, law firms, and companies. This year's report, released in April, is no exception, as it sheds light on the trademark prosecution practice exploring the diverse trends revealed by the data, and meticulously identifying and highlighting the leading players in the field.
In our previous articles, we explored key findings from the report, including the notable decline in Chinese trademark filings after a decade. We also highlighted some of the most accomplished attorneys specializing in trademark prosecution. This week, we shift our focus to unveil top law firms, examining their activity and performance within this dynamic landscape.
Trademark Intelligence 2023 analyzes all concluded U.S. trademark applications filed between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2022, encompassing both registered and abandoned filings. The scale of this undertaking becomes apparent when considering the sheer volume of 2,939,200 trademark applications under review, originating from 206,722 U.S. and foreign trademark applicants. There are 26,274 trademark firms actively participating in this process, supported by an extensive network of 32,904 trademark attorneys. The chart below illustrates the application filing trends over the past five years:
As shown above, the annual trademark filing trends experienced a significant growth of 30.54% in 2020. In 2021, there was a slight decline of 1.56%, with a similar number of trademark filings. However, 2022 witnessed a notable decrease, with 546,964 trademark applications filed compared to 681,633 in the previous year, resulting in a decline of 19.76%. While filing activity declined in 2022, it remains higher than pre-2020 levels. This trend, as well as the potential reasons behind the decline, were previously covered in a dedicated article. We consider various metrics when calculating performance and activity scores and generating the rankings for all entities. When assessing their activity, we closely examine the number of registered trademarks, while the performance score takes into account a weighted average of both success and activity, as further explained in this article.
In the table below, you'll find a list of some of the very best law firms, recognized for their high activity and distinguished performance. Their rank within the top 300 out of 26,274, positions them among the top one percentile.
| Law Firm | Trademarks | Category |
Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greenberg Traurig LLP | 4683 | Most Active | 27 |
| Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton | 3802 | Most Active | 37 |
| R.J. Pierce Law Group | 2095 | Best Performing | 40 |
| Perkins Coie | 3024 | Most Active | 53 |
| Polsinelli | 2140 | Most Active | 78 |
| Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie LLP | 2112 | Most Active | 81 |
| Cozen O'Connor | 1762 | Most Active | 107 |
| Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks | 1754 | Most Active | 108 |
| Law Office of Curt Handley | 1519 | Most Active | 128 |
| Fenwick & West LLP | 1225 | Most Active | 161 |
| Maven IP | 833 | Best Performing | 207 |
| Alston & Bird | 860 | Most Active | 231 |
RANKING METHODOLOGY
Ranking law firms and entities is a complex process that involves overcoming a multitude of challenges. One of these challenges is the cleaning of entity names, a task that requires the expertise of highly skilled engineers and data scientists armed with powerful computational resources. Patexia's Data Science team has continually improved the Entity Name Resolution algorithm over time, utilizing advanced NLP and Machine Learning to enhance data accuracy and reliability.
The Patexia Data Science team harnessed various signals extracted from raw trademark data to build the model and calculate parameters for activity and performance rankings. These signals underwent evaluation by the trademark community through a conducted survey before this report series was generated. Among the essential signals used in our assessment are Activity Count, Applications Filed, Applications Concluded, Registration Rate, Number of Office Actions, Pendency, Number of Time Extensions, and Oppositions. For activity assessment, the Activity Score was calculated by tallying the number of registered trademarks obtained by trademark owners, law firms, or attorneys during 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. In response to feedback from our trademark community, we defined the Success Score as a weighted average, comprising the Registration Rate, the Number of Office Actions, and the Oppositions. Recognizing that relying solely on success scores and rankings would not effectively compare entities with varying levels of activity, we introduced the Performance Score. This score takes into consideration both success and activity as weighted averages, providing a more comprehensive assessment.
The full Trademark Intelligence Report offers a comprehensive spectrum of high-level statistics that illuminate the intricacies of the trademark landscape. These statistics encompass a wide array of insights, including trends in filing, registration, and abandonment, as well as the examination of office actions, pendency periods, and foreign filing trends. The report also delves into the ranking of countries by their growth and decline in trademark filings, offering an invaluable global perspective. Additionally, it provides an analysis of domestic and foreign filing activity offering a dedicated analysis of the Chinese-originating trademark applications among others. These, along with the rankings of attorneys, law firms, and companies, make this report a treasure trove of information for professionals and stakeholders in the intellectual property domain.
Stay tuned as in the following weeks we will be covering some of the best performing and most active pharma companies in ANDA litigation based on our ANDA Intelligence 2023 Report published back in August.