Filing an Expungement or Reexamination Petition: A Practitioner's Guide to the Reasonable Investigation, the Prima Facie Case, and the Director's Discretion
By Casey Scott McKay ·
This guide is the operational half of the Marksy article on the Trademark Modernization Act cleanup tools, and it assumes you know the difference between expungement and reexamination. It builds a petition from scratch in twelve stages, beginning with a ten-minute diagnostic that picks the right tool from three facts - the registration's age, its filing basis, and its specimen - and ending with what to do when the Director declines to institute. Its center is the reasonable investigation: a source-by-source protocol tailored to the type of goods, with capture and authentication standards, plus the tailoring judgments that separate an instituted petition from a denied one. It supplies model petition language, a verified-statement template, an evidence index, the sequencing rules for coordinating a petition with your own pending application, and a separate protocol for the letter of protest, which is cheaper than everything else and consistently underused. The final stages take the registrant's chair and explain the response strategy that saves a registration, and the annual use file that makes the whole problem trivial.
IP and Technology > Trademarks | Guide | Published 18 July 2025 - Updated 24 May 2026 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us
Summary. This guide is the operational half of the Marksy article on the Trademark Modernization Act cleanup tools, and it assumes you know the difference between expungement and reexamination. It builds a petition from scratch in twelve stages, beginning with a ten-minute diagnostic that picks the right tool from three facts — the registration's age, its filing basis, and its specimen — and ending with what to do when the Director declines to institute. Its center is the reasonable investigation: a source-by-source protocol tailored to the type of goods, with capture and authentication standards, plus the tailoring judgments that separate an instituted petition from a denied one. It supplies model petition language, a verified-statement template, an evidence index, the sequencing rules for coordinating a petition with your own pending application, and a separate protocol for the letter of protest, which is cheaper than everything else and consistently underused. The final stages take the registrant's chair and explain the response strategy that saves a registration, and the annual use file that makes the whole problem trivial.
Keywords: expungement petition drafting · reexamination petition · reasonable investigation protocol · prima facie nonuse · evidence of nonuse capture · wayback machine evidence · specimen reverse image search · director institution · registrant response strategy · deletion of goods · excusable nonuse · letter of protest packet · suspension of application · 37 cfr 2.91 · petition fees · blocking citation strategy · use evidence file · ttab cancellation fallback · portfolio audit
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