Houston
trademark attorney

These are separate systems that do separate things, and owners conflate them constantly.

The scenario we see. An owner forms “Bayou Fitness LLC” in Texas, spends four years building it, and receives a demand letter from a company in another state that federally registered a similar mark two years earlier. The Texas filing is no defense. The registered owner has nationwide priority. The Houston business rebrands — new signage, new vehicle wraps, new domain, new social handles, and a customer base that has to be told where they went.

Not all names are equally protectable. Trademark strength runs along a spectrum, and where your name falls determines how hard it is to register and how much protection it buys.

The trade-off worth understanding before you name a business. A descriptive name tells customers immediately what you do, which is good marketing and bad trademark law. An invented name requires marketing investment to build meaning, and then it is genuinely yours. Firms named after their founder face the surname problem — protection generally comes only after the name has acquired distinctiveness through use.

What you can register

• Word marks — the name itself in standard characters, which is the broadest protection because it covers any styling.
• Design marks — a logo, with or without words.
• Slogans and taglines, where they function as source identifiers rather than ordinary advertising.
• Service marks — the same thing for services rather than goods.
• In narrower cases, trade dress, colors, and sounds.

Texas calls the LLC’s internal governing document a compa

Before you file, and ideally before you commit to a name at all, someone should look.

A knockout search of the USPTO database is free and takes minutes, and it will catch the obvious conflicts. It will also miss the ones that matter most: phonetically similar marks, marks covering related goods in a different class, state registrations, and common law users — businesses with no registration at all who nevertheless have priority in their geographic area because they used the mark first.

A proper clearance opinion covers federal registrations and pending applications, state registrations, business name databases, domain and social media use, and industry sources. It answers two questions: can this register, and can someone stop us from using it.

any agreement (BOC § 101.001) — what the rest of the country calls an operating agreement. No statute requires you to have one, and it is not filed with the state. It is still the most important document your company will sign.

The USPTO does not refund filing fees. An application refused for likelihood of confusion costs you the full fee and the months of pendency. And a refusal is the cheap outcome — the expensive one is discovering the conflict after you have built the brand.

Realistic timeline: roughly a year to eighteen months in a clean case, longer with office actions or an opposition.

Intent-to-use, in practice

Section 1(b) is genuinely useful. It lets you lock in a priority date before launch, while you are still building the product or negotiating a lease. You must eventually show real use in commerce through a Statement of Use, supported by a specimen — a photo of the product packaging, a screenshot of the sales page, an advertisement for services. Extensions of time are available at a fee, in six-month increments up to statutory limits.

Specimens are where applications die. The USPTO wants evidence of the mark used in actual commerce, not a mockup, not a logo file, not a business card for services. Digitally altered or fabricated specimens are treated as fraud on the office and can invalidate the registration. Send us what you actually have and we will tell you whether it qualifies.

The USPTO restructured its trademark fees in January 2025, replacing the old TEAS Plus / TEAS Standard split with a base fee plus surcharges. These are the government fees only — attorney fees are separate.

Two ways to keep the cost down. Use the pre-approved Trademark ID Manual descriptions where they genuinely fit your business — that alone is a $200 per class difference. And be deliberate about classes: file where you actually sell, not everywhere you might someday. Every class multiplies every fee in this table, now and at every renewal for the life of the mark.

Government fees change. These reflect the schedule in effect as of the review date below; confirm current fees at uspto.gov before filing.

Texas maintains its own trademark register with the Secretary of State under Business & Commerce Code Chapter 16.

• Requires prior use in Texas. Unlike a federal intent-to-use application, the mark must already be in use in Texas commerce for the relevant goods or services before you file (§ 16.003).
• Texas only. No rights outside the state.
• Five-year term, renewable by filing during the last six months of the term.
• Cheaper and considerably faster than federal registration.

For a business operating only in Texas with no plan to expand, state registration is a reasonable, inexpensive layer. For anyone selling online, shipping outside Texas, or planning to grow, federal is the one that matters.

A federal registration is not permanent by default. It has maintenance deadlines, and missing one cancels it.

Watch out for solicitation scams. Trademark owners receive official-looking invoices from private companies with names resembling government agencies, offering “registration” or “monitoring” services for hundreds of dollars. USPTO correspondence comes from the USPTO. If a notice arrives about your mark and you are unsure, forward it to us before paying anything.

A registration you never enforce weakens over time. Trademark rights depend on the mark continuing to identify a single source, and tolerated infringement erodes that.

• Watch for conflicts. Monitoring services flag new applications similar to yours while there is still an opposition window.
• Oppose or petition to cancel. Proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board are often cheaper than litigation.
• Cease-and-desist, done well. Tone matters. Many infringements are genuinely accidental — a small business that never searched. A proportionate letter frequently resolves it, and an aggressive one against a sympathetic defendant can turn into a public relations problem.
• Platform takedowns. Amazon, Etsy, Meta, and most marketplaces have brand registry and takedown programs that a federal registration unlocks.
• Federal litigation when it is warranted — and a mediator’s assessment first of whether it truly is.

If you received a demand letter: don’t ignore it and don’t fire back the same day. There are usually more options than the letter suggests — the sender’s rights may be narrower than claimed, your use may predate theirs, or a coexistence arrangement may serve both businesses. Bring it in.