Refund & Credit Policy.

• We do not give cash refunds. An eligible refund request becomes account credit. You accept this rule when you place an order.
• Credit can be applied to any current or future GTC invoice.
• 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 is not a refund trigger. We are 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 point in detail.

Most of our work happens before there is a visible result. By the time you see a registration certificate, we have drafted, filed, paid the office, monitored deadlines, and often answered the examiner. That work cannot be undone weeks or months later.

A credit keeps the value of what you paid. You can use it for your next filing, your next country, or your next renewal. This works better for both sides than a dispute over the value of finished work.

It also matches what we sell. We sell work: preparing, filing, prosecuting, responding. We do not sell outcomes, because the offices that examine applications decide the outcomes.

We issue account credit in these situations:

• You cancel before we start. If you cancel before we have drafted, searched, filed, or otherwise worked on your matter, the full professional fee you paid is credited to your account.
• We made a mistake. If a deliverable contains a material error that is our fault (not a result of information you supplied), we fix it at no further professional fee and credit the affected portion of the work.
• You were charged twice. A duplicate payment is credited at once.
• 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 country, dropped a class, or chose a smaller service: if the work had not started yet, the price difference is credited.
• Goodwill. We may give a goodwill credit to a long-standing client. Goodwill credits are at our discretion. We do not promise 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.

Every order on our platform separates three amounts:

• Our professional fee: what we charge for our work. This is the main amount that Section 3 can credit.
• The government fee: what we pay to the relevant office (USPTO, EUIPO, UKIPO, WIPO, IP India, CNIPA, JPO, IP Australia, CIPO, INPI, and so on). We charge it at cost. Offices can change their fees. You pay the government fee in force on the day we file.
• The bank fee (5%): 5% of the government fees, for paying offices abroad.

Once a government fee has been paid to an office, it cannot be recovered, by us or by 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 have filed.
• You discover, post-filing, that the mark or invention is unavailable in the jurisdiction.
• You withdraw before substantive examination concludes.

We cannot credit government fees that we have already paid for you. That money is with the office. 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 government fees before paying them and you cancel before we have paid the office, we will credit those held fees back. Apart from a fee that came in lower than invoiced (Section 3), that is the only government-fee case where credit applies.

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 decision, not ours. We are paid for preparing and filing the application; we are 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. The same applies.
• Abandonment (including abandonment for failure to respond to an office action when you have chosen not to instruct us to respond, or because you have 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 do not 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), Section 3 ("we made a 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?

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. The most common cases are:

What is typically included in a new-application professional 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 is typically quoted separately, with the price disclosed before we start:

• Substantive Office Action responses: likelihood-of-confusion refusals, descriptiveness refusals, lack-of-distinctiveness refusals, 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.
• Local attorney fees: in countries where a qualified local attorney files for you.
• Translations, courier costs, notarization, legalization: typically charged at cost.
• GTC Advantage overages: work beyond the hours included in your GTC Advantage plan.

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

How it is recorded. 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 would like to use your credit on a specific invoice (by email, in a support ticket, or in the portal) and we will book it for you. We do not auto-apply credit to invoices, because we want you to choose which invoice it lands on (useful when you have several matters).

Currency. Credit stays in the currency you paid in. If you want to apply USD credit against an INR invoice, we will 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 does not 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 have confirmed the relationship.

No cash redemption. Credit has no cash value. You cannot 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 stops an older credit from expiring while a newer one is used.

Credit expires 12 months after we issue it. If it has not been applied to an invoice within that period, it is removed from your account balance.

Your credit confirmation email shows the expiry date. If your credit expired a few days ago, tell us, and we look at it in good faith. We do not extend credits automatically.

To ask for an extension, write to billing before the expiry date and give the reason. We consider extensions case by case. We are 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.

Cash refunds happen in four narrow situations:

• Chargebacks. If you dispute a charge with your card issuer and the issuer rules in your favor, the refund happens through your card issuer's process. Our system records it. We do not 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 cannot be waived by agreement, we honor that right on the terms required by law. For example, a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom can withdraw from an online order within 14 days. If you asked us to start work in that time, you pay for the work done before you withdraw, and the right ends when the work is complete.

Outside these four cases, a refund is given as credit, not cash. We do not make exceptions to this rule.

Three steps:

1. Open a support ticket on the Help page of your client portal, or email billing@globaltrademarkcompany.com.
2. Tell us the invoice or order number, the amount you think should be credited, and the reason. Details help.
3. Attach supporting documents if you have them (screenshots, correspondence, evidence of the issue).

Our timing. 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 (local attorneys, government correspondence, fraud reviews) can take longer; we keep you informed.

If approved, you get a confirmation email with the amount, reason, related invoice, and expiry. If declined in whole or in part, we will 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.

If you have a question, or you disagree with a decision, email billing@globaltrademarkcompany.com and we will talk it through. We try to resolve a disagreement in a conversation before either side starts a formal proceeding.

Where this Policy and the Terms and Conditions 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. The older version stays accessible on request.