Who is behind this

I built the tool I wanted for myself.

Office Actions usually repeat standard language from the Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure. The manual draws on the Board’s decisions, but it offers only a few examples, and a few examples rarely change an examiner’s mind.

The Board’s decisions go much further. Somewhere in them there is usually a case with facts like yours, an argument that worked, or at least a reason for the examiner to take a second look.

Relatedness refusals are a good example. Around 2020, more examiners began supporting Section 2(d) refusals with little more than website printouts and third-party registrations. The answer was in Board decisions the manual does not cite, especially the ones on whether that kind of evidence is enough to show the goods are related.

Citing decisions the manual leaves out was only the start. The Board has issued far more decisions than any manual can cite. They are all in the TTAB Reading Room (opens in a new tab) ↗, but its search is limited, and you still have to read each decision yourself to find the few that matter. I wanted the searching and the reading done once and catalogued, so I could search the results for patterns, arguments and citations, form my view, and draft faster.

Trademark Valet is that tool. It reads the decisions, codes each one the same way, rewrites it in plain English, and links it back to the Board’s own record, so business owners and attorneys can start from what the Board actually did.

— Brandon Leavitt

Legal services are provided by Valet Law, PLLC. The platform and its tools are operated by Trademark Valet, LLC, which is not a law firm. The two are kept separate on purpose, and every page says which one you are dealing with.

Each TTAB decision is parsed into a fixed schema by an automated pipeline. 73 of the 178 summaries were written from the original opinion and 105 from records already extracted into our database; an attorney confirmed the research-significance rating on 62. The summaries are published as research records. Each one shows its review status, and none has yet been approved by an attorney. Three rules govern it:

• The extraction rules prohibit filling missing factual fields with guesses. If a decision does not state a fact, the field is left empty. The plain-English summaries and the factor coding are interpretive; each record says whether an attorney has reviewed them.
• Quotations are verbatim. If the exact text cannot be located in the opinion, the quotation is not used.
• Citations come from the decision. Supporting authority is not added from memory, however well known. Where a page reports what the corpus shows, it states the number of decisions behind the figure, the date of the dataset, and what was excluded. Corpus findings are descriptive statistics about a curated library — not base rates for all TTAB decisions, and not predictions.

Research pages are living documents. When the law moves, the page gets a dated update; it is not quietly rewritten. Every page shows whether an attorney has reviewed it and when.

Automated drafting is used for first drafts and research. Answers and guides are published only after a lawyer has reviewed the legal propositions, case characterizations, quotations and citations. Decision summaries are published as research records before that review; each one states whether it has been reviewed, and none claims review it has not had.

Nobody can promise you a trademark. The Board weighs the facts of each case, and reasonable arguments lose all the time. So you will not find a prediction on this site dressed up as a certainty, and you will not see the words always or never used about what the Board will do.

Claims about the corpus, the method and attorney review are stated so they can be checked.

Nothing on this site is legal advice and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Do not send confidential information through a public form. If you want advice about your own situation, that starts with a conflicts check and an engagement letter with Valet Law, PLLC.