Received a provisional refusal on your international trade mark?

This service deals with a refusal that has already been issued. Instead of helping with filing strategy or country selection, the work centres on the objections raised in the provisional refusal notice and what they mean for your application. We review the notice, explain the grounds raised, and outline possible response paths. It is a one-off advice service, not ongoing representation for the full overseas process, and it does not automatically include preparing submissions to the foreign office.

Most clients book this service after receiving a formal notice saying protection has been provisionally refused in one or more countries under an international trade mark filing. Often the notice is difficult to interpret, especially where the objection refers to local practice, classification issues, descriptiveness concerns, or conflicts with earlier rights. This consultation is useful when you want a lawyer to assess the refusal quickly, explain the commercial significance, and help you decide whether to respond, narrow the application, appoint overseas counsel, or stop pursuing that designation.

Not always. Whether a direct response is possible depends on the country involved and the rules applying to that office. In many cases, a locally qualified representative or agent may need to be appointed to lodge the formal response. This service helps you understand that issue before you spend more on the matter. We can identify when local representation is likely to be required, what information that representative may need, and how your refusal notice should be interpreted before that next step is taken.

Usually not. Provisional refusals are often highly specific to the wording of your application, the goods or services claimed, the earlier rights cited, and the examination approach of the country involved. A generic response can miss the real issue or adopt a position that is not commercially useful. This service gives you advice tied to the actual refusal notice you received, including the nature of the objection and whether the matter looks like something that can be answered directly or needs broader overseas trade mark support.

After the consultation, you should have a clearer view of what the refusal is about, which issues appear procedural versus substantive, and what the likely next step is. In some matters, the sensible next move is to prepare a response through a local associate in the country that issued the refusal. In others, it may be better to reconsider the wording of goods and services or the commercial value of continuing. If broader work is needed, we can explain the likely handover or follow-on legal work.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the International Trade Mark Advice Provisional Refusal service, pricing starts from $900.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.