Examination

Your personal examiner will examine your application based on the requirements of the Trade Marks Act Rules. Further information relating to how the examiner will determine if your application is acceptable or not is available on our Trade marks we can accept page.

We will send you an examination report within 15 days of receipt of your application.

This report will confirm that your application is acceptable or advise you of any objections or other queries that your examiner may have. This report will also pprovide you with a deadline to reply but in the meantime you will be able to contact your examiner directly to discuss the report.

Earlier potentially conflicting trade marks on the register

If there are earlier trade marks that are the same or similar to the one that you have applied for, for the same or similar goods and/or services, your examiner will tell you about them in the examination report.

A period of two months is allowed for you to discuss the case with the examiner and make proposals in writing. Please note that we can only allow one opportunity for written correspondence.

If you decide to proceed with your application, and the earlier trade marks remain in conflict with your application, we will notify the owners of these earlier marks and advise them that your application is to be published.

The application will then proceed to Phase 3 which is the publication of your trade mark in our weekly Trade Marks Journal.