01 September 2021

Dates of Trademark Applications currently at Examination

CIPO’s main trademark web page (here) has a section headed “Dates of Trademark Applications currently at Examination” in which the oldest date listed (as of 01-Sep-2021) is “Week of December 3rd, 2018”.  Does this mean that there are no unexamined applications with earlier filing dates?  No it does not.

Here is that section as it appeared on 01-Sep-2021:

Applications at Examination

It may be that as of 01-Sep-2021 CIPO’s examination efforts were concentrated—in the case of applications not using the Pre-approved List of Goods and Services—on applications filed in the “Week of December 3rd, 2018”.  However, the latest (i.e. 30-Aug-2021) version of CIPO’s trademark .xml data reveals that the current backlog of unexamined applications (excluding Section 9 official/prohibited mark applications) includes over one thousand cases filed before December 2018, as summarized below:

pre Dec-2018 unexamined cases

In other words:
  • 30,348 of the 37,180 applications filed in April 2018 through November 2018 have received at least an initial examination;
  • 5,712 of those 37,180 applications are inactive (i.e. abandoned, withdrawn, etc.); and
  • the remaining 1,120 applications have not been examined as of 30-Aug-2021.
By way of example, here are the 20 oldest unexamined applications as of 30-Aug-2021 (i.e. unexamined applications having filing dates in April 2018 through September 2018).  The serial numbers provided below are hyperlinked to CIPO’s online trademark database.  You can check the examination status of these cases by clicking the hyperlinks.  Bear in mind that the examination status of these cases will change as CIPO works its way through the backlog of older cases.

        Filing Date    Serial No.
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