10 May 2021

The Coming Agent Shake Out?

With the College of Patent Agents and Trademark Agents expected to become operational soon, it is timely to review some trademark agent appointment statistics.

2021 agent appointments

In order to maintain one’s status as a registered Canadian trademark agent one must pay an annual fee to CIPO.  The fee, which is currently $306 if paid online or $357 otherwise, is due by March 31st.  Once the College is operational, trademark agents will have to pay an additional $700 licensing fee to the College in order to maintain their ability to represent parties before CIPO1.

Many factors can affect the decision to maintain one’s agent status.  One possible factor is business volume, e.g. the number of applications in which one is appointed as agent.  The following table, derived from CIPO’s trademark .xml data as of 3 May 2021, presents some statistics pertaining to agent appointments in applications filed since 2010 (click to enlarge the table).

Agent Filing Stats

# Agents
  • This column indicates the number of agents currently appointed in one or more applications filed in each of the indicated years.
  • The tabulation reflects agents currently of record as of 3 May 2021, taking any post-filing changes of agent into account.  For example, if an application initially appointed agent A, then if agent B is subsequently appointed to continue prosecution of the application, that application is counted only in respect of the currently appointed agent B.
  • Although an application may not appoint an agent, this does not necessarily mean that no agent is involved in filing or prosecuting the application.  For example, filings by in-house corporate trademark agents do not always appoint an agent.  Such filings are not tabulated above—only filings for which an agent is appointed are tabulated.
  • For various practical reasons, most agents who practice within firms appoint the firm—not any individual(s)—in respect of marks handled by the firm. In such cases the firm counts as one agent even though dozens of individual agents may be handling the firm’s trademark docket.
  • CIPO’s trademark .xml data tracks filings by separate offices of multi-office firms.  For example, each of the Calgary, Hamilton, Kitchener, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver offices of Gowling WLG (Canada) LLP are currently appointed as agent in respect of filings made in 2020 (i.e. one of those offices is appointed in each filing).  Those 7 offices count as 7 of the 608 agents enumerated in the # Agents column for 2020.
# Filings
  • This column indicates the total number of applications filed in each of the indicated years for which an agent is currently appointed.
  • Agents are not appointed in a significant number of filings, e.g. pro se filings, some filings by in-house agents and many inbound Madrid filings.  For example:
    • No agents are currently appointed in 11,800 of the 25,087 applications filed thus far in 2021 (i.e. 47% of those applications do not appoint an agent).
    • 2,930 of those 25,087 applications are inbound Madrid cases, which often do not appoint an agent until a later prosecution stage—if at all.  Indeed, 2,843 (i.e. 97%) of those 2,930 Madrid cases do not currently appoint an agent.  Stated another way, an agent is currently appointed in only 87 of those 2,930 Madrid cases.
    • No agent is currently appointed in 8,957 of the 22,157 non-Madrid (i.e. national) applications filed thus far in 2021 (i.e. over 40% of the national applications filed thus far in 2021 do not appoint an agent).
Low
  • This column indicates the lowest number of appointments of any one agent in the indicated year.
  • In every listed year the low value is 1, meaning that at least one agent is appointed in only a single application filed in each year.  The exact numbers of single-appointment agents are provided below for each year.
High
  • This column indicates the highest number of appointments of any one agent in the indicated year.
Average
  • This column indicates the average number of appointments amongst all agents in the indicated year.
Median
  • This column indicates the median number of appointments amongst all agents in the indicated year.
  • The median is the middle value in a set of values.  For example, 608 agents are currently appointed in applications that were filed in 2020.  Slightly over-simplified, the 2020 median value 13 indicates that half of those agents (i.e. 304 agents) are currently appointed in more than 13 applications filed in 2020 and the other half are currently appointed in fewer than 13 applications filed in 2020.
Mode
  • The mode is the value that occurs most often in a set of values.
  • The mode is 1 in every listed year.  This means that a single appointment per year has been the most common situation throughout the agent community over the past decade.
The next tabulation breaks down the number of appointments per agent (click to enlarge the table):

Appointments/Agent grouping

The column headed “1” corresponds to the aforementioned single-appointment agents.  For example, the value 78 at the intersection of the 2021 Year row and the “1” column means that each one of 78 agents are currently appointed in only a single application filed in 2021.  As another example, the value 23 at the intersection of the 2020 Year row and the column headed “251 to 500” indicates that each one of 23 agents are currently appointed in between 251 and 500 applications filed in 2020.

The chart at the top of this post graphically summarizes the appointments of the 500 agents currently appointed in one or more applications filed  in 2021.  I did not plot the average or median values (respectively 26.57 and 8) on the chart because at the scale shown those values are so close to one another and to the horizontal axis that they are nearly indistinguishable.  Click the chart to enlarge it.

1 For those who are both patent and trademark agents, the College’s licensing fee for the remainder of 2021 will be $1,050.↩

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