Pre-Assessment vs. Examination

Examination reports have issued on 1,138 applications which have undergone goods / services description pre-assessment (as of 11-Jul-2022).  This does not necessarily imply that CIPO is accelerating examination of pre-assessed applications.

On 23-Mar-2022 CIPO began automated pre-assessment of goods / services descriptions “...to help decrease the inventory of applications awaiting examination...and improve overall wait times to registration in Canada” (see Trademark Pre-assessment Letters).

In addition to pre-assessing an application’s goods / services description, CIPO assesses the application for compliance with the registrability requirements in section 12 of the Trademarks Act, RSC 1985 c. T-13.  Potential registrability obstacles are raised in examination reports issued by CIPO examiners.  If the examiner perceives no obstacles then the application is approved for advertisement in the Trademarks Journal.  As of 11-Jul-2022, 1,105 pre-assessed applications have been advertised; 3 have been opposed; and another 1,203 have been approved for advertisement.

As mentioned, 1,138 applications have received both a pre-assessment letter and an examination report as of 11-Jul-2022.  The filing dates of those 1,138 applications range from 12-Feb-2019 to 20-May-2022¹, with 743 clustered between February - December 2019.  These are among the older (but not the oldest) items in CIPO’s backlog of unexamined applications² and they would likely have been taken up for examination irrespective of CIPO’s pre-assessment initiative.

Here are the pre-assessment results of those 1,138 applications:

Pre-Assessment Result	# Applications
Acceptable Goods or Services (Produits ou services acceptables)	618
Goods or Services Not Acceptable (Produits ou services non acceptables)	244
Goods or Services Not Classed (Produits ou services non classés)	62
Improper Classes (Classe de Nice incorrecte)	38
Multiple Reasons (Plusieurs raisons)	109
Retired Goods or Services (Produits ou services retirés)	67
Total	1,138

For 27 of those 1,138 applications, the Pre-Assessment Letter has the same date as the examination report.  For 10 of those 1,138 applications, the examination report date precedes the Pre-Assessment Letter date.  This implies that pre-assessment of an application’s goods / services description is independent of examination for registrability compliance and vice versa. 

For the remaining 1,101 applications, the average time between the Pre-Assessment Letter date and the examination report date is 40.9 days, with the median being 37 days.  This might have implied accelerated examination of these 1,101 applications, but for the implication mentioned in the preceding paragraph and the likelihood that these older applications would have been taken up for examination anyway.

Have a question about Canadian trademarks that might be answerable by reference to CIPO’s data?  Send me an email—I’ll try to look into it and let you know (subject to these Terms & Conditions).

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1 See application no. 2182629.^↩

2 As of 11-Jul-2022, CIPO's backlog of unexamined applications includes over 34,000 applications filed in 2019.^↩