TM TKO just added a new manual search field – mark length. What can you do with this?

Let’s say you have a client with a two-letter mark – an acronym for their company name. Let’s say your client is a bank – Penny & Associates. It wants to register its PA (stylized) mark. A prior registration for PA (stylized) is owned by Pennsylvania Accountants, Inc. – but with a pretty different stylization. Before you file, you want to see if there are any other examples of co-existence for these same services with other two-letter marks.

With TM TKO, you can find co-existence and find examples of applicants for conceptually similar two-letter marks who faced a refusal — and overcame it.

First things first – let’s find co-existence examples. We’ll search for two-letter terms for “banking” services in Class 36, and limit to use-based registrations (to show actual marketplace overlap). We get 150 different matching results. Sort by mark, so we bring identical marks together, regardless of owner. It’s then simple to tag the overlap. We get a number of examples of co-existence: AB (3 different owners), BB (3), BC (2), C1 (2), CB (8), CC (2), FP (2), FS (3), L1 (2), MM (3), MW (2), PB (3), SC (2), SP (2), SS (2), and UN (2).

See the results:

You can export to Excel or Word, or grab current status and title copies with one click via the TSDR export button to provide your Examiner evidence of the overlap.

If you do the same search for Office Actions (add a “Cited Trademark Criteria” to limit to 2-letter cited marks and an “Office Action Criteria” and the “Issue” as “2(d)”), and you can use a similar search strategy to find other applicants who have overcome similar problems.

Happy researching!