CIPO’s weekly trademark .xml data release for 26-Jul-2022 through 01-Aug-2022 reveals that only 521 pre-assessment letters were sent in that period. None were sent after 28-Jul-2022. This suggests that CIPO may have paused—or possibly terminated—the pre-assessment initiative.
128,901 pre-assessment letters were sent between 23-Mar-2022 and 28-Jul-2022 inclusive; an average of 6,784 per week, as tabulated below.
See Trademark Pre-assessment Letters for a summary of the pre-assessment results thus far.
Some questions remain. For example, over 4,000 applications filed in 2019 (see for example application no. 1940447 filed 11-Jan-2019); over 6,000 applications filed in 2020; and over 39,000 applications filed in 2021 remain unexamined without having undergone pre-assessment. This raises the possibility that CIPO may continue pre-assessment—at least with respect to older unexamined applications—possibly after fine-tuning the pre-assessment AI.
Another question is whether applications having goods / services descriptions that were voluntarily amended in response to a negative pre-assessment (anything other than Acceptable Goods or Services / Produits ou services acceptables) will be subjected to another pre-assessment.
Another question is whether a human examiner substantively examining an application will take a prior pre-assessment result into account or simply review the goods / services description and Nice classification(s) anew.
And so on. Practitioners are undoubtedly hoping that instead of just pausing the pre-assessment initiative CIPO has ended it altogether, given their overall negative reaction to pre-assessment (see The Pre-Assessment Problem).
