Foreign Filing Firms That Rent US Attorney Credentials: What to Check

What the USPTO is actually warning about

When the USPTO began requiring foreign-domiciled applicants to use a US-licensed attorney, it created demand overnight for something specific: a US attorney’s name on a filing. Some operators met that demand by hiring attorneys to do the work. Others met it by buying the name.

The USPTO describes the practice it is policing in fairly precise terms. It covers firms that pay a US attorney to use their name and bar credentials on filings where the attorney has minimal, if any, participation; firms that pay an attorney to sponsor USPTO accounts for support staff the attorney does not employ or supervise; and the use of an attorney’s credentials without permission at all.

The consequences run from suspension of accounts to referral to the USPTO’s Office of Enrollment and Discipline, and the sanctions process can terminate the applications and registrations involved.

It is worth being clear about what is not in scope. There is nothing improper about a foreign law firm working with a US attorney, or about a US attorney taking instructions from an overseas agent, so long as the attorney of record genuinely does and supervises the work. The line is participation, not nationality and not price.

Why it costs the applicant, not the firm

This is the part worth sitting with. In the ordinary case the person who pays is the applicant, who did nothing wrong.

You paid a fee. You were told a US attorney was handling it. Somewhere in a system you cannot see, that was not true. When the USPTO acts, it acts on the filings — and the filings are yours. The operator moves on. You are left with a terminated application, a lost filing date, and often several years of use behind an unregistered mark.

There is a quieter cost too, and it shows up long before any sanction. An application nobody reviewed tends to be a bad application: the wrong filing basis, a description of goods copied from another country’s classification, a specimen that will not survive examination. It receives a refusal that a competent attorney would have avoided entirely — and then you pay a second time to fix it.

Five questions that expose it

You do not need to be a lawyer to run these. Ask before you pay, and ask again if anything changes.

1. What is the name of the attorney who will be attorney of record? A name, not a firm and not “our legal team.” If nobody will give you a name, you have your answer.
2. Which US state licenses them, and can I verify it? Every US state bar publishes a searchable list of licensed attorneys. Look them up yourself. It takes two minutes.
3. Will I communicate with that attorney directly? Not exclusively — firms have staff, and that is normal. But if the attorney is never available and never on a call, ask why.
4. Who chooses my filing basis and drafts my description of goods? These are legal judgements. If the answer is a form, a portal, or an offshore processing team, no attorney is exercising judgement on your file.
5. Who signs the filings? Signatures at the USPTO are personal. An attorney who has not seen a document should not be signing it, and staff should not be signing in an attorney’s name.

Once you have a serial number you can verify the answers yourself. The USPTO’s public status system shows the attorney of record and the correspondence address on every application. If the name there is not the name you were given, that is worth an immediate conversation.

Warning signs in how a service is sold

None of these is proof on its own. Several together are a pattern worth taking seriously.

• A price far below everyone else, with the attorney included. Someone is being paid very little for the legal work, or nobody is doing it.
• A guarantee of registration. No attorney can guarantee the outcome of examination. Anyone promising it is either misinformed or selling something else.
• No attorney named anywhere on the website, the engagement terms, or the invoice.
• Unsolicited approaches referencing your existing application, particularly invoices for “registration” or “publication” in registers you have never heard of. Trademark filings are public, and that data feeds a whole industry of look-alike invoices.
• Pressure to decide immediately on a deadline they will not show you in the USPTO’s own correspondence.
• Correspondence that never comes from the attorney’s own domain, or that arrives from a different company name each time.

If you think you already used one

Do not panic, and do not assume the worst. A cheap service is not automatically an improper one, and plenty of low-cost filings are perfectly sound.

Do check, in this order:

1. Look up your application status in the USPTO’s public system using your serial number. Note who is listed as attorney of record and what the correspondence address is.
2. Verify that attorney with their state bar. If they do not exist, or are not licensed where claimed, you have a real problem and should move quickly.
3. Check for pending deadlines. If correspondence has been going to an address you do not control, there may be one running right now.
4. Appoint counsel you have verified yourself. You can change attorney at any time, you do not need the previous one’s permission, and the process is a routine filing.

The mark itself is usually recoverable. What is often not recoverable is time — so the useful thing to do with a suspicion is to check it this week rather than think about it for a month.