CIPO received 67,000 trademark applications1 in 2023. This post breaks them down2 in terms of filings which either do or do not appoint an agent—for all filings, Madrid filings and non-Madrid filings respectively.
Agents are not appointed in a significant number of applications, e.g. pro se filings, some filings by in-house corporate trademark agents and most inbound Madrid Protocol applications (which often do not appoint an agent until a later prosecution stage—if at all).
The following table and chart provide an overview of 2023 filings (click to enlarge any image):
For comparison, the next table and chart provide the same details for 2022, in which CIPO received 68,001 trademark applications. Filings decreased in 2023, as did the percentage of Non-Madrid applications with agents appointed in comparison to the 2022 percentage.
For further comparison, the table and chart below provide the same details for 2021, in which CIPO received 78,405 trademark applications. Filings decreased in 2022, but the percentages of applications with agents appointed increased in comparison to the 2021 percentages.
1 This includes all types of applications handled by CIPO’s Trademarks Branch, e.g. trademarks, certification marks, official / prohibited (i.e. Section 9) marks, geographical indications, plant variety denominations, etc. Bear in mind that the filing date of an inbound Madrid Protocol application is deemed to be the international registration date of the corresponding Madrid registration; and that it can take weeks or months for a Madrid application to arrive at CIPO. Accordingly, a count of 2023 Madrid filings may change depending on when the count is done.↩
2 The breakdown reflects CIPO’s trademark .xml data as of 31-Dec-2023. Note that filings per se are not tracked; rather, current appointments of agents are tracked as of 31-Dec-2023. For example, if an application filed in 2023 initially appointed agent A, and if agent A’s appointment was revoked, with agent B being subsequently appointed in 2023 to continue prosecution of the application, then that application is counted only in respect of the currently appointed agent B.↩
