Design patent coordination for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

Prosecuted by a USPTO-registered practitioner; CapEasy prepares the drawings package and coordinates.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for design patent coordination — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Design patent coordination sits inside trademarks & ip, alongside Trademark search & registration, Trademark office action response, Trademark renewal (§8 & §9). Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

A design patent protects the ornamental appearance of a functional article — a specific shape or surface pattern, as shown in the drawings. A trademark protects a source-identifying mark like a logo or brand name; copyright protects an original creative work. A product's shape, a logo on it, and any artwork printed on it are three separate things that can need three separate filings.

A USPTO-registered patent attorney or agent — someone who has separately passed the USPTO patent bar exam. Since July 20, 2026, this is mandatory for any foreign-domiciled applicant, with no exception for design patents. CapEasy prepares the drawings and the design brief; the registered practitioner drafts, signs, and files.

The formal drawing set covering every required view, checked against USPTO drafting standards; the written design brief describing the article and its claimed features; and the prior-art references the client already knows about, organized for the practitioner. The practitioner drafts the claim and specification and files.

The combined filing, search and examination fee, paid once at filing, is $1,300 at the large-entity rate, $520 for small entity, or $260 for micro entity (effective January 19, 2025). The issue fee due on allowance sits at the same three tiers. There is no maintenance-fee schedule after that — a design patent doesn't need a renewal payment across its term the way a utility patent does.

14 years from the grant date, with no maintenance fees due during that term. That's a real difference from a utility patent, which is enforceable for 20 years from filing but requires maintenance-fee payments at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years to stay in force.

Solid lines show what's actually claimed as the protected ornamental design; broken lines show surrounding context — the rest of the article — that isn't being claimed. Getting this split right decides how broad or narrow the resulting patent is. We work out which surfaces the client actually wants protected before the drawings are finalized, so the line treatment matches the intent.

That's a design patent Office Action, and it comes back for one of two reasons: the examiner found prior art too close to the claimed design, or found a formal problem — usually an inconsistency between drawing views or unclear line treatment. The response window is typically three months, extendable to six with a fee. The registered patent attorney or agent files the response; we can support with revised drawings if the fix is drawing-side.

There's a filing deadline tied to public disclosure or sale in the US, so timing matters — this is exactly the kind of question the practitioner needs to assess against the specific facts (when the design was first shown, sold, or published) before filing. Flag the disclosure history at intake so it reaches the practitioner early, not after a deadline has already passed.

That depends on whether the differences change what's ornamentally claimed — a design patent claims the specific design shown in its drawings, not a family of variations. Whether a second filing is warranted for a variant is a call the practitioner makes looking at what actually differs; we can prepare drawings for whichever variant the practitioner decides needs its own application.

All three government fee tiers scale off the same base — small entity is roughly 40% of the large-entity rate, micro entity roughly 20% — and the tier applies to both the filing fee and the issue fee. Micro-entity status has its own eligibility criteria (income limits, prior-application limits) that the practitioner confirms; we flag entity size for the practitioner to verify rather than assuming it.

No — that's what a utility patent covers. A design patent only reaches the ornamental appearance shown in the drawings; a competitor who builds the same function in a visibly different shape is outside a design patent's reach. If the function itself is the thing worth protecting, that's a different conversation and a different filing.