Stephanie is a Trademark Examiner and Attorney with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. She tells us that internships are always available at her office and they are one of the best ways into the business.
Transcript
>> My name is Stephanie Ollie, and I am a Trademark Attorney with the US Patent and Trademark Office in Virginia. We're responsible for making sure that individuals and applicants get their trademark application for their goods and services that they provide. For example, like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, those kind of products, if you see that little R with a circle, that's what a trademark is. And so the caveat with me, I've been with my-- with the Patent and Trademark Office for 14 years, but five of which I have been working from home, and so my day is a little different from the average trademark attorney who has to get up and drive into an office. I have the blessing of getting up and going downstairs. And my day is very flexible. I can, you know, work my schedule however which way works best for me and my family, but typically because we are-- we do everything electronically, I get up, we sign on the computer, and I have cases that I will-- [inaudible] call them applications that I review for, and if there's a problem with them then I would issue something that we call an office action to the applicant. If there's a-- they have usually six months to respond, so they can respond earlier than that, and if they do then that's something called a response and generally if it's not-- if they have not responded in the way that we need them to, to make the application complete, then we would write another office action that we call final office action and we've outlined, hey, this is, y, this is the problem with the application, and you have six months to do it, and if you don't do it, then your application will go in a final abandonment stage and then there's a whole lot of other legalities after that, but that's typically what the day-- it's really handling a lot of paper.
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