Built for the way San Francisco builds brands
San Francisco is the engine room of the U.S. tech economy. SoMa is the launching pad for SaaS and AI startups. Hayes Valley and the Mission are home to a steady stream of consumer apps, DTC brands, and design studios. The Financial District anchors fintech, payments, and crypto. Mission Bay holds biotech and life sciences. And every batch of Y Combinator demos a new wave of product names that need protecting before the seed round closes.
Every one of those founders eventually faces the same federal hurdle. Your product name, your company name, your logo, and your codebase need real protection, and the USPTO does not care which floor of which building you launched from. We help San Francisco tech founders file trademarks, register copyrights, and build IP portfolios that hold up when the category gets crowded. Flat fees. Plain language. A process built for founders who are already drowning in board decks and term sheets.
Why San Francisco founders call us
San Francisco has the densest concentration of corporate IP firms in the country. Most of them are excellent at patent prosecution and Fortune 500 portfolio work. Most of them also bill $1,200 an hour, charge for every email, and treat trademark filings as a side dish next to the main patent course. That is not what most early-stage founders need.
We are different by design. Single point of contact means you talk to the attorney working on your file, not a paralegal four steps removed. Flat-fee pricing means you know the total cost before you sign, useful when you are running on a fixed pre-seed or seed budget. ID Manual first means we use pre-approved USPTO descriptions to keep your government fees at the lowest tier. And fully remote means a SoMa SaaS founder, a Mission consumer brand, and a Mission Bay biotech all get the same treatment without any office tourism.
Who we help in San Francisco
We work with brand owners across the city’s most active categories. Below are the most common engagements. If your situation is not listed, it is probably still a fit. See all who we help.
Startups
YC, Techstars, and South Park Commons founders locking down product and company names before the seed round, the Series A, or the public launch.
Developers & Software Creators
Solo developers, indie hackers, and small SaaS teams protecting product names, logos, app icons, and source code as creative works.
Fintech Startups
FiDi and SoMa fintech founders protecting product names, logos, and trade dress in one of the most aggressively-filed categories in the USPTO.
Scaling Brands
Series A and beyond companies hitting growth where the gaps in their IP show up. Multi-class filings, monitoring, and international expansion strategy.
Artists & Designers
Independent artists, illustrators, and design studios in the Mission, Dogpatch, and Outer Sunset registering copyrights and protecting visual marks.
Small Businesses
Restaurants, retail, fitness studios, and service businesses across the Bay Area protecting concept names, taglines, and signature offerings.
Services for San Francisco clients
Most San Francisco engagements start with one of the five services below. Pre-seed and seed startups tend to start with clearance and standard filing. Series A and beyond often need monitoring and multi-class strategy. We scope and price every service up front, before any work starts. See all trademark services or see all copyright services.
The process
Our part of the process takes about 7 to 10 days from intake to USPTO submission. From there, the USPTO controls the timeline. As of 2026, expect 8 to 14 months from filing to a registration certificate, assuming no substantive issues.
Strategy call
A 30-minute call to understand your product, your goods and services, and your funding timeline. We confirm scope and flat-fee pricing before any work starts.
Clearance search
A Go/No-Go search across federal, state, and common-law sources. You receive a written report explaining risk level and recommended next steps.
Class and description selection
We map your product to the right USPTO classes using ID Manual descriptions. The lowest-fee, lowest-friction path through the application. Read more in our breakdown of why the ID Manual matters.
Application drafted and filed
We draft your application, walk you through it for sign-off, and submit it directly to the USPTO. You receive your serial number the same day.
Examination and publication
8 to 10 months later, your application is reviewed by a USPTO examiner. If approved, it is published in the Official Gazette for a 30-day opposition period.
Registration
If no one opposes, the USPTO issues your registration certificate. Your trademark is enforceable nationwide for 10 years, renewable for as long as you use it in commerce.
Flat-fee pricing
Trademark filing should not be a surprise bill, especially when you are watching every dollar of pre-seed runway. Below is the most common engagement, a single-class federal trademark application. Multi-class filings, copyright registrations, and complex matters are quoted up front before any work begins.
Note: USPTO government filing fees ($350 per class as of 2026) are billed separately and paid directly to the USPTO at the time of filing. Custom descriptions outside the ID Manual incur a $200 per class USPTO surcharge. We use ID Manual descriptions wherever possible to keep your fees at the lowest tier.
San Francisco FAQs
The questions we hear most from San Francisco founders before they engage. Do not see yours? Send it over. We will answer it on the consultation call.
No. Trademarks and copyrights are governed by federal law. The USPTO and the U.S. Copyright Office have nationwide jurisdiction, and any U.S.-licensed attorney can represent you on a federal filing regardless of which state either of you is in. We work with San Francisco clients entirely remotely. Video consultations, electronic signatures, and email-based status updates.
After. The trademark applicant should be the legal entity that owns the mark, typically the Delaware C-Corp or LLC you set up before fundraising. If you file under your personal name and then have to assign the mark to your company later, that creates extra paperwork and a potential gap in your IP record. The cleanest path is: incorporate first, run the clearance search, then file under the company name. We can usually move from intake to filing within a week of you sending us the formation docs.
Yes, and you should, especially if you are still in stealth or pre-launch. A Section 1(b) Intent-to-Use application lets you reserve your trademark with the USPTO before you have a single user. You lock in a priority date today, which means anyone who tries to use a similar name after that date is standing behind you in line. We file ITU applications regularly for SF founders who are still in development, beta, or pre-launch. Read more in our guide to ITU applications.
Not at all. Whether you are in San Francisco proper, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, or anywhere else in the Bay Area, the federal trademark process is identical. We work with founders and businesses across the entire Bay Area the same way. Remote consultations, electronic filings, and a single point of contact.
I represent clients nationwide for Federal (USPTO) trademark matters. Federal law allows any U.S. attorney in good standing to practice before the USPTO, which is why we work with San Francisco clients every week.
However, state-level trademark applications are governed by individual state laws. I am licensed to practice law in the State of Minnesota, so I cannot directly file a California state trademark application. For most SF tech companies this is not a concern, since federal registration provides nationwide protection that is significantly broader than any state filing. If your situation specifically requires a California state registration, I can help you evaluate whether federal is the better path or refer you to local California counsel.
Depends on your structure. If your product name and company name are the same (Stripe, Notion, Figma), one filing covers it. If they are different (the company is "Acme Labs" and the product is "Acme.ai"), you generally want to file the customer-facing product name first because that is what your users, the press, and competitors actually recognize. The company name can come second. We map this on the consultation call so you spend filing dollars on the marks that matter, not the ones that do not.
Our part, from intake to USPTO submission, takes about 7 to 10 days. After that, the USPTO controls the timeline. As of 2026, expect 8 to 10 months to first examination, another month or two for publication and opposition, and then registration. Total: typically 10 to 14 months from filing to a registration certificate, assuming no substantive issues.