How to register a trademark in India

We filed Standing Lawyers' own trademark applications this week, the word and the logo, from this desk, without an agent. This note is the map we wish we had at the start: what a trademark protects that your company registration does not, what to search before you spend a rupee, what to file, what it costs, and what the next 18 months look like.

Most founders believe the name question was settled the day the company was registered. The certificate of incorporation carries the name. The GST registration carries the name. The current account, the Udyam certificate, the letterhead, all of them carry the name. It feels registered, because it appears on so many government documents.

None of those documents protects it. Company incorporation stops another company from registering an identical name with the Registrar of Companies, and nothing more. It does not stop a proprietorship, a partnership, an LLP, or a person from trading under your name tomorrow morning. A proprietorship is weaker still: there is no incorporation at all, so there is not even a register to collide with. Anyone may open shop under the same name, in the same city, in the same trade, and your remedy is a passing-off action in which you must prove your reputation from scratch, invoice by invoice, before a court will help you.

The trademark is the actual registration of a brand. It is the one document that makes the name property, enforceable against strangers, transferable, licensable, and renewable forever. Everything else is stationery.

Search before you spend

A trademark application is examined against every earlier mark on the register, and a conflict discovered after filing costs you the government fee and months of correspondence. So the search comes first, and it is free.

The Registry's public search sits at tmrsearch.ipindia.gov.in. It is not elegant, but it answers the only question that matters: is there anything on the register, in your class of goods or services, confusingly similar to your name? Three searches cover the ground. A wordmark search set to Contains, for the distinctive part of your name. A phonetic search for the whole of it, which catches the STANDIN and LAWERS variants a literal search misses. And the same wordmark search repeated in the neighbouring classes you might grow into.

When we ran ours, the four searches returned 83 results. That number is less alarming than it looks, for two reasons. First, a Contains search matches substrings, so a search for STANDING dutifully returns every UNDERSTANDING and OUTSTANDING on the register. The sweep is wider than the query, which is a feature. Second, most of what comes back is dead. Every result carries a status, and the statuses do most of the work of reading: Registered, Objected, Advertised and Opposed are live and matter; Abandoned, Refused and Withdrawn are gravestones. Of our 83, not one contained the word LAWYERS at all, and nothing in our class began with STANDING. That is what a clear register looks like.

Two honest limits. The search reads the register as it stands today, so an application filed last week but not yet indexed is invisible, and so is the trader who never registered but has used the name for a decade and built common-law rights in it. Neither is a reason to delay. Both are reasons the filing date matters, because priority runs from the day you file, and every week of waiting is a week in which someone else's application can slip in ahead of yours.

Keep the exports. If an examiner later objects that your mark is descriptive, the registered marks you found sitting comfortably on the register, built from the same ordinary words, become exhibits in your reply.

The word, the logo, or both

A trademark application holds exactly one mark. If you want the name and the logo protected, that is two applications, and the choice of what to file repays 10 minutes of thought.

The word mark is the valuable one. Registered as a plain word, STANDING LAWYERS is protected in any font, any colour, any size, spoken on the phone, typed into a search bar, printed on a rival's hoarding. If you file only one application, file this.

The logo is filed as what the Registry calls a device mark. Here there is a subtlety worth knowing before you choose the artwork. If you file the logo with the name set inside it, the composite, Section 17 of the Trade Marks Act gives you exclusive rights in the mark as a whole, not in its parts. That registration does not separately protect the symbol used alone as a favicon or a watermark, nor the symbol paired with different words. If the symbol alone is the brand, or will become it, it deserves its own application. We filed the composite, knowing the limit, because the lockup is what actually appears on our letterhead, and the symbol can have its own application later if it earns one.

One more decision hides in the artwork: colour. A mark filed in black and white, with no colour claimed, is treated as registered for all colours. A mark filed in your brand colours, with the colours claimed, is protected in that combination. Our brand is forest green and cream, and we filed in black and white anyway, because the trademark should own the shape, not the paint. A competitor who lifts your lockup and recolours it in navy should still be squarely inside your registration.

What it costs, and who can file it

The government fee for e-filing is ₹4,500 per mark, per class, if the applicant is an individual, a DPIIT-recognised startup, or a registered small enterprise. Everyone else pays ₹9,000. A sole proprietor filing in their own name is an individual for this purpose, which surprises people who assume the discount needs an MSME certificate. It does not. Our two applications cost ₹9,000 in total, and the fee is per class, so a mark wanted in 3 classes is 3 fees.

The class matters more than the fee. The register is divided into 45 classes of goods and services, and your registration protects you only in the classes you claim, only for the goods and services you describe. Legal services live in Class 45. Software as a product lives in Class 42. Retail and business consulting live in Class 35. Describe your services in the language of the classification rather than marketing copy, and resist the urge to write a specification that wanders into neighbouring classes; it does not get you protection there, it gets you an objection and a month of correspondence.

You do not need an attorney to file. The Act lets an applicant file in their own cause, and the e-filing portal, for all its 2003 aesthetics, works. What you do need is a way to sign: either a Class III digital signature on a USB token, or the Aadhaar-based eSign that the portal offers through a customised eMudhra link on its own login page. The eSign route cost us ₹295, needed no hardware, and went from sign-up to a working signing credential in 13 minutes, entirely on Aadhaar OTP. Two warnings from the trenches: subscribe only through the link on the IP India portal itself, because the plan sold on the general eMudhra site is not configured for the Registry and fails at the signature step; and if a payment session dies midway, the portal locks the form for 40 minutes before letting you try again, which is a feature protecting you from paying twice, not a malfunction.

Where an attorney earns their fee is later: a reasoned reply to an examination report, a hearing, an opposition. Filing is form-filling. Prosecution is advocacy.

The statement of use

Every application declares either that the mark is proposed to be used, or that it has been used since a specific date. Founders instinctively claim the earliest date they can, on the theory that older is stronger. Resist the instinct unless the claim is real and provable.

A use claim must be supported by an affidavit of use with evidence, dated invoices, advertisements, screenshots with provenance. It invites scrutiny of exactly what was supplied and when. And it buys you less than it appears to: your rights date from the filing date either way, and a use claim of 3 weeks impresses nobody. Proposed to be used is a perfectly respectable answer, requires no affidavit, and keeps the application clean. Claim use when you have years of it and the paper to prove it; the claim then does real work in an objection or an opposition. Keep collecting the dated evidence regardless, because if a descriptiveness objection ever escalates, acquired distinctiveness through use is the argument that wins it, and it runs on precisely this file.

What happens after you pay

The same afternoon, two things. You may start using ™ beside the mark, which asserts the claim and costs nothing. And you may not use ®, not until the certificate issues; representing an unregistered mark as registered is an offence under Section 107, and the small circle is not worth a prosecution.

Then the Registry's clock starts. A formalities check in the first weeks. An examination report in 1 to 3 months, in which an examiner tests the mark against the absolute grounds in Section 9, is it descriptive, and the relative grounds in Section 11, does it conflict with an earlier mark. Objections are routine, particularly for names built from ordinary words, and a reasoned reply resolves most of them. The deadline is the part to respect: one month from receipt of the report, and the clock runs from receipt whether or not you opened the email. A fortnightly glance at the portal is cheaper than a restoration application.

If the reply satisfies, the mark is advertised in the Trade Marks Journal, and the world gets 4 months to oppose. Most marks pass through unopposed. The certificate follows, typically 8 to 18 months after filing if nothing goes wrong, and the registration, when it issues, is deemed to run from your filing date. Renewal is every 10 years, indefinitely, and a registration unused for 5 years becomes vulnerable to removal, so the brand should be a working one, not a trophy.

While you wait, nothing stops you trading. The application number is your place in the queue, the ™ is on the masthead, and the priority date is banked.

Before you file anything

The whole exercise, for us, was one afternoon and ₹9,000 of government fees, plus ₹295 for the signature. If a brand is worth the letterhead it is printed on, it converts into this checklist:

1. Run the free search at tmrsearch.ipindia.gov.in before anything else: wordmark Contains for the distinctive word, phonetic for the whole name, in your class and the ones you might grow into. Export the results and keep them.

2. Decide what you are protecting: the word, the logo, or both. The word mark first if the budget allows only one. Remember that a composite logo does not separately protect its parts.

3. File the logo in black and white with no colour claim, unless the colour itself is the brand.

4. Write the specification in the classification's own language, inside your class, and no wider than the services you actually supply or genuinely intend to.

5. Claim "proposed to be used" unless you hold years of dated evidence, and start an evidence file today either way.

6. Diarise 2 dates the moment you file: a fortnightly portal check for the examination report, and the 1-month reply deadline the day it lands.

7. Use ™ from the filing date. Save ® for the certificate.

We filed ours this week. The applications are in the queue at the Registry, the ™ is on the site, and the register now has our names in it, spelled exactly the way we intend to defend them.