Refund & credit policy.

1. The Short Version

• We don't do cash refunds. Eligible refund requests become account credit instead.
• Credit can be applied to any current or future GTC invoice in the same currency.
• Credit expires 12 months after we issue it, unless we agree otherwise in writing.
• Government fees — what the USPTO, EUIPO, UKIPO, WIPO, IP India, CNIPA, or any other office charges — are never refundable, no matter what the outcome is.
• If an IP office refuses, opposes, or rejects your application, that's not a refund trigger. We're paid for the work we do, not for the office's decision.
• We process cash refunds in only four narrow cases (chargebacks, government mandate, fraud, non-waivable statutory rights — see Section 9).

The rest of this page explains each of those bullets with the detail your legal team will want to see.

2. Why Credits Instead of Cash

Honest answer: most of our work happens before there's any visible result. By the time you see a registration certificate, we've already drafted, filed, paid the office, monitored deadlines, possibly responded to examiner queries, and corresponded with foreign agents. If something needs to change weeks or months later, unwinding all of that doesn't really work.

Credits let us keep the relationship intact when something needs adjusting. You don't lose what you paid — you just route it to your next filing, your next jurisdiction, your next renewal. We've found this works better for both sides than picking apart finished work to figure out what was "really" delivered.

It also keeps us honest about what we sell. We sell work: preparing, filing, prosecuting, responding. We don't sell outcomes, because the outcomes belong to the patent and trademark offices that examine applications. A credits model makes that distinction clean.

3. When You'll Get a Credit

We issue account credit in these situations:

• You cancel before we've started. If you cancel before we've drafted, searched, filed, or otherwise put billable hours into your matter, the full service fee paid is credited back to your account.
• We made an actual mistake. If a deliverable contains a material error that's our fault — not a result of information you supplied — we fix it at no further service fee charge AND credit the affected portion of the work.
• You were charged twice. Duplicate payments are credited immediately, no questions.
• The government fee came in lower than what we estimated. If the actual fee remitted to an office is less than what you were invoiced (rare, but it happens with class-count adjustments), the difference is credited once we have proof of the actual remittance.
• You downgraded before work began. Removed a jurisdiction, dropped a class, switched from premium to standard — if the work hadn't started yet, the price difference is credited.
• Goodwill. Sometimes we just want to do right by a long-standing client. Goodwill credits are entirely at our discretion — we don't promise them, we don't owe them, but they exist and we use them.

Credit decisions sit with our billing team and follow this Policy. We confirm every credit by email, with the amount, the reason, the related invoice or order, and the expiry date.

4. Government Fees (Always Non-Refundable)

Every order on our platform separates two amounts:

• Our service fee — what we charge for our work. This is the only amount that's potentially creditable under Section 3.
• The government fee — what we pass through to the relevant office (USPTO, EUIPO, UKIPO, WIPO, IP India, CNIPA, JPO, IP Australia, CIPO, INPI, and so on). We pass these through at cost, with no markup, and absorb scheduled fee adjustments and currency fluctuations within the quoted figure.

Once a government fee has been paid to an office, it is gone — we can't get it back, and neither can you. Every IP office sets its own non-refund rules; almost all of them keep filing fees regardless of outcome. This is true even if:

• Your application is refused on substantive grounds (likelihood of confusion, descriptiveness, lack of distinctiveness, etc.).
• Your application is opposed by a third party and ultimately abandoned.
• You change your mind after we've filed.
• You discover, post-filing, that the mark or invention is unavailable in the jurisdiction.
• You withdraw before substantive examination concludes.

We can't issue a credit for government fees that we've already remitted on your behalf — that money isn't ours to credit. This is the case across every service we offer: U.S. trademark filings, Madrid Protocol designations, European Union registrations, India trademark prosecution, China filings, copyright registrations with the U.S. Copyright Office, patent applications, and every other government-touched workflow.

Where we hold fees in escrow before remitting them and you cancel before we've paid the office, we'll credit those held fees back. That's the only government-fee scenario where credit applies, and it's narrow by design.

5. Office Decisions Are Not Refund Triggers

This is the most important section. Please read it carefully.

Most of our work involves filing applications with government offices that we do not control. A trademark examiner at the USPTO, an examination division at the EUIPO, a registrar at IP India, an examiner at the Indian Patent Office — every one of them decides for themselves whether an application succeeds. Their decisions are not ours to make, and not ours to predict with certainty.

An office's decision is not a basis for a refund or credit from us. Specifically:

• A substantive refusal — for example, a USPTO §2(d) likelihood-of-confusion refusal, a §2(e) descriptiveness refusal, an EUIPO absolute-grounds objection, an inventive-step objection from a patent office — is the office's call, not ours. We're paid for preparing and filing the application; we're paid again for any response we draft.
• An opposition filed by a third party against your published application is not a refund trigger. We can quote the defense work; the existence of the opposition is not something we caused.
• A cancellation or invalidation filed against a registration is not a refund trigger. Same logic.
• Abandonment — including abandonment for failure to respond to an office action when you've chosen not to instruct us to respond, or because you've decided not to invest further — is not a refund trigger. The earlier work was done; it stands.
• A Madrid Protocol designation falling under central-attack rules within five years of the international registration is a feature of the Madrid system, not something we caused. Designations that fall with the base mark do so by treaty, not by error.
• Examiner discretion — different examiners reach different conclusions on similar facts; this is a known feature of substantive examination. We don't refund or credit for the natural variability of human examination.

Where we made a mistake that contributed to an adverse outcome — for example, we filed in the wrong class because we misread your instructions and you flagged it to us — that's a different conversation, and Section 3 ("we made an actual mistake") applies. The line is: was the adverse outcome the office's reasoned decision on the application as filed, or was it something we got wrong on our end?

6. What's Included vs. Quoted Separately

When you order a service from us, the price you see covers a defined scope of work. Anything outside that scope is quoted separately, transparently, before any further work begins. Here's how that breaks down for the most common situations:

What's typically included in a new-application service fee:

• Pre-filing review of the mark, invention, or work and a quick conflict scan.
• Drafting the application, specification, claims, or identification of goods/services.
• Filing the application with the relevant office.
• Standard procedural Office Action responses (for U.S. trademarks: specimen replacements, identification clarifications, disclaimer requirements, minor amendments) — included in the new-filing fee for trademarks unless we tell you otherwise upfront.
• Filing receipt and registration certificate delivery once the office issues them.

What's typically quoted separately, with the price disclosed before we start:

• Substantive Office Action responses — likelihood-of-confusion refusals, descriptiveness refusals, lack-of-distinctiveness refusals, written enablement objections, inventive-step objections, written-description objections.
• Opposition, cancellation, invalidation proceedings — both defending and prosecuting.
• Post-grant maintenance — renewals, declarations of use, post-registration amendments, transfers of ownership, change-of-name recordals.
• Foreign-associate fees — local counsel in jurisdictions where we engage a local agent on your behalf.
• Translations, courier costs, notarization, legalization — typically passed through at cost.
• Subscription/retainer overages — work beyond the monthly retainer ceiling in our GTC Advantage subscription.

Because everything outside the defined scope is quoted upfront before we work on it, paying for additional scope is your active choice. Once you've authorized that work, the same rules in Sections 3 and 5 apply to it.

7. How Your Account Credit Works

Where to find it. Sign in to your client portal and look for the credits view. Every credit issuance is recorded with a date, an amount, a currency, the reason, the related invoice or order, and an expiry date.

How it gets applied. Tell our billing team you'd like to use your credit on a specific invoice — by email, in a support ticket, or in the portal — and we'll book it for you. We don't auto-apply credit to invoices, because we want you to choose which invoice it lands on (especially useful when juggling multiple ongoing matters).

Currency. Credit lives in the currency you paid in. Dollars stay dollars, rupees stay rupees, euros stay euros. If you want to apply USD credit against an INR invoice, we'll convert at the rate in effect on the day we apply — currency margins, if any, are disclosed at the time.

Account-bound. Credit belongs to the client account that earned it. It doesn't transfer to a different account, a related company, an affiliate, or a successor entity, except by prior written authorization from an authorized signatory and after we've confirmed the relationship.

No cash redemption. Credit has no cash value. You can't sell it, exchange it, or convert it. It applies only against GTC invoices.

Order of use. When there are multiple credits on your account, we apply the one with the earliest expiry first ("first-expiring-first-out"). This protects credits you've earned from quietly expiring while newer credit gets consumed.

8. Expiry: 12 Months

Credit expires 12 months after we issue it. If it hasn't been applied to an invoice within that period, it's removed from your account balance.

We send a reminder email at least 30 days before any credit is set to expire (and usually earlier). If you've lost track and a reminder slipped through, please let us know — we'll work with you in good faith, even if the formal expiry has passed by a few days. But we don't auto-extend, and we can't reinstate credits that have been forfeited.

Need an extension? Contact billing in writing before the expiry date and tell us why. We consider extensions case by case. We're more likely to extend if you have an upcoming filing or renewal in sight than if you have no planned use.

Goodwill credits and promotional credits may have shorter expiry windows than the default — we tell you upfront if so. Subscription credits (e.g. unused hours within a GTC Advantage tier) follow the rules of that subscription, not this Section 8.

9. When We Do Process Cash Refunds

Cash refunds happen in four narrow situations:

• Chargebacks. If you dispute a charge with your card issuer and the issuer rules in your favour, the refund happens through your card issuer's process. Our system records it. We don't issue additional credit on top of a successful chargeback.
• Government-mandated refunds. If a court, regulator, ombudsman, or competent authority in a jurisdiction we operate in issues a binding order requiring a cash refund (for example, under a consumer-protection statute), we comply with that order.
• Fraud remediation. If we determine that a payment was made by an unauthorized party (stolen card, compromised account), we refund the unauthorized payment to its source as part of our fraud-remediation process.
• Non-waivable statutory rights. Where the law in your jurisdiction grants a refund right that can't be waived by agreement (some consumer-distance-selling regulations, for example), we honour that right on the terms required by law.

Outside these four cases, the default is credit, not cash. We won't negotiate the credits-only default — that would defeat its purpose. If your situation isn't covered here, the answer to "could I have cash instead?" is going to be no.

10. How to Ask for a Credit

Three steps:

1. Open a support ticket in your client portal at /client/help, or email billing@globaltrademarkcompany.com.
2. Tell us the invoice or order number, the amount you think should be credited, and the reason. Concrete details help.
3. Attach supporting documents if you have them — screenshots, correspondence, evidence of the issue.

Our pace. We acknowledge credit requests within two business days and issue a decision within ten business days from when we have all the information we need. Complex cases — foreign associates, government correspondence, fraud reviews — can take longer; we'll keep you posted.

If approved, the credit appears in your portal, and you get a confirmation email with the amount, reason, related invoice, and expiry. If declined in whole or in part, we'll explain why in writing and tell you what (if anything) you can do next.

Please submit credit requests as soon as you can after the circumstance giving rise to the request. We may decline requests submitted more than 12 months after the relevant invoice was issued, unless applicable law requires us to consider them.

11. Questions or Disputes

Got a question, or unhappy with a decision we made? Email billing@globaltrademarkcompany.com and we'll talk it through. We try hard to resolve disagreements over a conversation before either side reaches for a formal proceeding.

Where this Policy and the Terms of Service address the same subject, the Terms govern. Where service-specific terms attached to your order address the same subject, those service-specific terms govern only on the narrow point they address; this Policy otherwise applies.

We may update this Policy from time to time. The version in force on the day you place your order is the version that applies to that order. We notify active clients of material changes through the client portal and by email — and the older version stays accessible on request.