UAE - Trade Mark Office issues notices on practice for oppositions/rejections and registration certificates

This post was update on 5 January 2015.....

The Trade Mark Office in the UAE does not publish practice guidelines on the Ministry of Commerce website. However, it does, from time to time, send emails to all agents telling them what to do. At the end of November the Trade Mark Office issued two such notices.

The first, issued on 23 November 2014, relates to oppositions and rejections and states that:

• All appeals will be heard by the Trade Mark Committee pursuant to the Trade Mark Law.
• All agents must provide the Trade Mark Office with a list of all pending appeals setting out the issues.
• From now on all supporting documents must be filed with the appeal to avoid matters coming to the Committee without them. All documents must be notarised (local) or legalised (from overseas).

The second, issued on 25 November 2014, relates to registration certificates and states that:

• Registration certificates for agents in Dubai will be issued from the Trade Mark Office branch in Dubai and those for agents in Abu Dhabi from the main Trade Mark Office in Abu Dhabi. Any certificates needing correction must go to the correct location.
• The Trade Mark Office disclaims responsibility for any final registration forms or fees sent by mail or handed to the customer services centre in Abu Dhabi.

This part of the Empty Quarter dreamt on the National Day holiday that the Trade Mark Office was:

• no longer bound to have documents legalised (but knows this is not an issue for the Trade Mark Office but for the Federal government). 
• fully staffed so that there is no backlog of issues to deal with.
• accurate in the capture of data so that publication takes place for and certificates can be issued showing the data as applied for.