Apostille Patent and Trademark Documents

Doing business overseas incurs many challenges, one of these being authenticating corporate documents to be used abroad.

Depending on the destination country, you must choose one of two processes:

• To Apostille your documents
• To Legalize your documents

The Hague Convention of 1961 established a uniformly accepted authentication process. You will apostille documents if the destination country is a member of the Convention. Non-member countries follow the legalization process.

To apostille documents, you must present the original patent or trademark document to the US Department of State in Washington, D.C.

To legalize documents, once you have the authentication approval from the US Department of State, you then must work with the destinations country’s Embassy or Consulate to further legalize the patent or trademark document.

Before We Continue…

First, let’s clarify a couple definitions.

Trademark – protects a symbol, name, work, logo, or design used to represent the manufacture of goods.

Patent – gives property rights to an inventor for a new product, preventing others from making an identical product.

Intellectual Property (IP) Law – deals with the area of legal rights of creative works and inventions. It controls who gets to use the creations – including new products, artistic works, and designs. The purpose of IP law is to allow the people who create and invent things to profit from their work.

Apostille Patent and Trademark Documents

Patents and trademarks that are acquired in the U.S. are only accepted in the U.S.; they cannot be transferred to other countries.

There are instances when you will need to authenticate the patent or trademark documents:

• Selling products overseas – either purchase patents in those countries or apply for foreign patent protection
• Selling your patent or trademark to an overseas company

Before either of these can take place, you must prove you own the patent or trademark in the U.S., and you must be able to authenticate those documents.

As The Hague Convention of 1961 established a uniform process for authenticating documents, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, which came into effect in 1978, facilitates the filing of an application for patents for member countries by providing uniform filing procedures and a standardized application format.

Working With One Source Process

Acquiring an apostille or legalization for a patent or trademark document can be difficult and time-consuming when being done on your own. At One Source Process, we specialize in the apostille and legalization process for all personal and corporate documents; including apostille patent and trademark documents.

Let us quickly and correctly obtain the correct authentication needed. Simply fill out the Order Form here and mail us the original patent (with the gold seal affixed) or trademark document.

That’s it.

Depending on your destination country, you may need your apostilled documents professionally translated; we can do that as well.

Please Contact Us if you have any questions regarding apostille patent and trademark documents. We are here 7 days a week to assist you.