Filing Your Trademark On Your Own: The 6 Mistakes That Cost the Most

Filing a trademark on your own through the INPI portal or the European office’s portal looks simple: a few clicks, a few boxes to fill in, pay the fee, and you’re done. Many entrepreneurs handle these steps themselves to avoid paying attorney’s fees. But they aren’t aware of all the traps involved.

A trademark is an intellectual property title obtained through a registration process, and it can add value to the business that exploits it. But if the filing was done poorly, the trademark can turn out to be completely useless and lead to considerable costs. The INPI does not check whether you’re doing things correctly. The mistakes you can make sometimes only surface months or years too late: a cease-and-desist letter, an opposition, a cancellation action, an infringement action, and so on, from a competitor who was using a similar sign before you. And you find yourself having to change your name several months after you started building communications around it.

Here are the six mistakes I most often encounter among entrepreneurs who have filed on their own, and the ways an attorney can help avoid them up front.

Mistake #1: Filing without checking that the trademark is available

This is the most common mistake and, sometimes, it isn’t a mistake but a constraint, because prior-rights searches can be expensive. But they’re always cheaper than having to change your trademark later on.

Just because the INPI has validated the filing doesn’t mean the trademark is available. The INPI merely checks whether the trademark application complies with certain public-order rules: whether it isn’t misleading, purely descriptive, or whether it doesn’t offend public morals, for example. It does not check for existing prior rights, because it’s up to the holders of those rights to come forward.

The result: you can perfectly well obtain registration of your trademark, complete with a handsome certificate, and then receive a cease-and-desist letter from the holder of a similar trademark six months or three years later, after you’ve already invested in your logo, your business cards, your website, your SEO, and your reputation. You then have to change your name in a hurry, after spending a great deal of money for nothing, just because you wanted to save on attorney’s fees.

Some businesses have to change the name of a product that’s been on the market for more than a year, redo the packaging, the website, and all their communications, and notify their distributors and customers. And all of this simply because an earlier trademark—sometimes legitimately unused—had not been identified.

An attorney always starts there, if the client’s budget allows: a genuine prior-rights search. This search doesn’t just cover strictly identical trademarks but also similar trademarks, those that could create confusion in the public’s mind. Analyzed with a trained eye, the search results let you know whether the ground is clear or mined before you commit to anything.

Mistake #2: Choosing a name that is too descriptive

A name that’s great from a marketing standpoint isn’t necessarily acceptable from a legal one. Many entrepreneurs try their luck with a name that’s generic enough to inform the customer and achieve maximum search ranking. But a trademark must be distinctive: it cannot describe the products and services marketed under its name.

“Resto Rapide” (Fast Restaurant) for food-service offerings, “Appli Facile” (Easy App) for software, “Pain Frais” (Fresh Bread) for a bakery: these signs cannot be monopolized by a single business at the expense of its customers, who need to be able to use these terms. The risk is that your filing will be refused (and you’ll have lost time and money for nothing) or, if it slips through the cracks, that your trademark will be weak, since you’ll almost never be able to stop a competitor from using a similar name. Third parties can also always challenge your trademark for lack of distinctive character, even if you manage to get it registered.

An attorney’s role is to assess the distinctiveness of your sign up front and to help you strike a balance between the marketing vision and legal robustness. Sometimes all it takes is a slight addition—such as a fanciful change in spelling or a pairing with a distinctive word—to turn a fragile name into a trademark that’s genuinely registrable.

Mistake #3: Poorly drafting the list of goods and services

A trademark consists of a sign (a word, a logo, a video, a sound, etc.) and goods and services. A trademark cannot be filed “in the abstract.” Goods and services are catalogued in 45 classes that are standardized worldwide. But the “Nice Classification” doesn’t catalogue everything that exists, and you may not find the goods or services that correspond to your project in it.

Many entrepreneurs select general categories on the INPI website without taking the time to freely draft what most precisely corresponds to their project. That’s the first pitfall: drafting that’s too general, by checking the broad categories. But a trademark that isn’t used for all the goods and services it designates can be subject to a revocation action.

The second pitfall is to aim too narrowly and forget part of your current activity, or part of what you plan to cover in the future (you have 5 years from registration to start using your trademark).

Now, you can’t freely modify a trademark’s specification after filing. You can only narrow it, without adding anything, and any modification must be drafted carefully so as not to be refused by the office. If you’ve forgotten an important product or service, you’ll have to file a new trademark and pay the fees all over again.

An attorney can draft a tailor-made specification: neither too broad nor too narrow, targeted to your real activity today and to what you plan to develop tomorrow, by asking you the right questions and using tools they have fully mastered. This precision work can make all the difference the day a dispute arises.

Mistake #4: Believing that registering a domain name is enough

“I incorporated my company under that name”; “I bought the .fr and the .com”: no, that isn’t enough to protect your trademark. The company name, the trade name, and the domain name give you certain rights—limited ones—but they don’t carry the legal advantages of a trademark and don’t automatically grant you a monopoly over the sign you’ve chosen for your goods and services.

So, if you’ve registered the domain name but aren’t using it, or if your company name is only known locally, you won’t be able to effectively oppose the filing of your trademark by a third party for a similar activity.

An attorney can help you coordinate these different elements—company name, trade name, domain name, trademark—so that they reinforce one another, instead of giving you a false sense of security. And they’ll surely advise you to start by filing your trademark before choosing an identical company name…

Mistake #5: Getting the owner or the territory wrong

This is also a problem I regularly run into when my clients file on their own: in whose name should the trademark be filed, and in what territory?

Many of them file the trademark in their own personal name, either by mistake or because their company doesn’t yet legally exist. The goal, however, is for it to belong to the company that exploits it—unless the individual wishes to license it to the company (and even then, that license should be governed by a contract). Sometimes the trademark is in the name of company A when, in the end, company B should have been the owner.

Now, a trademark that isn’t held by the entity that exploits it, or that isn’t licensed to it, loses value. You notice this in particular the day the business is involved in a merger or acquisition or wants to carry out a fundraising round: the investor will check that the intangible assets are held by the right person, and if not, they’ll negotiate their investment downward. They’ll also require the situation to be regularized. That sometimes means a trademark assignment agreement will have to be drafted—one that can’t be for a symbolic price or free of charge—and that you’ll have to pay an attorney to draft it and to record it with the office.

The same goes for the chosen territory: a French trademark only protects you in France. If your current or future activity extends to other territories, it might have been better to file a European Union trademark, which a French attorney can do. Likewise, a French attorney can help you extend that trademark outside the Union if other territories interest you, whether neighboring (Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Monaco, etc.) or not (China, Brazil, Australia, etc.).

Conversely, if you filed in the EU when France would have been enough, you’ll have paid more for nothing.

An attorney knows how to ask you the most useful questions from the outset and tailors the filing strategy to your needs: the right owner, the right territory, at the right time. This is far simpler and far cheaper to arrange before filing than to fix afterward.

Mistake #6: Forgetting about the trademark once it’s been filed

There’s life after a trademark is born. That life lasts 10 years, by default. Sometimes less, sometimes more. And owners sometimes forget to monitor the growth of their trademark—understood as their intellectual property title.

Here are three classic oversights.

Monitoring: if a third party files a similar trademark, you have to react. Either within the opposition period (2 months from publication) or, at the very least, within five years from publication, to be safe (to avoid forfeiture). If you don’t actively monitor—in particular by reviewing the correspondence you receive from the European office—no one will warn you. Attorneys have special software to carry out this monitoring.

Use: if you don’t use your trademark for all or part of what it designates, anyone could request the revocation of your rights for the unused goods and services, starting 5 years after the trademark’s final registration. Having an attorney act as your agent on the trademark also makes it possible to monitor for incoming challenges from third parties.

Renewal: the trademark lasts 10 years and can be renewed indefinitely. But you mustn’t miss the deadline. Attorneys also have special software to carry out this monitoring.

An attorney can set up monitoring for third-party filings and for your trademarks’ deadlines, and step in when your rights are threatened.

What an attorney is really for, and how much it costs

An attorney isn’t just there to fill out the INPI form for you. They know how to advise you and ask the right questions: Is the name available? Is it lawful? Is the list of goods and services appropriate? Who should file the trademark? In what territory? What are the upcoming deadlines?

Settling these questions before filing can generate substantial savings that you don’t yet recognize when you file on your own.

True, filing on your own means committing only 190 euros in INPI fees. But having to manage an opposition, respond to a cease-and-desist letter or an infringement action, or even resign yourself to changing your name after several months or years of use represents a cost of an entirely different scale.

Working with an attorney also means a gain in time and peace of mind. While you focus on what matters—the commercial development of your brand—an attorney takes care of ensuring its legal soundness.

The six mistakes described above aren’t the only ones, but they have one thing in common: they’re all avoidable, provided you think about them at the right time—that is, before you click “Pay.”

Jérémie LEROY-RINGUET, mai 2026