John E. Dugger Esq. - Franklin, TN

John founded The Branding Iron in 2023 to offer founders and brand owners a different kind of trademark practice, one built around direct access to the attorney doing the work, flat fees quoted in writing, and no handoff to a document-preparation service partway through.

Before starting the firm, John served as a Trademark Examining Attorney at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the federal agency responsible for reviewing and registering U.S. trademarks. In that role, he was on the other side of the desk, reviewing applications, evaluating specimens, drafting Office Actions, and deciding whether marks satisfied federal registration requirements. That experience shapes how he now approaches applications for clients: identifying the issues an examiner is likely to flag, before an Office Action ever issues.

After his time at the USPTO, John moved in-house, handling intellectual property and disputes matters as Associate Counsel at Temu, a large online marketplace where brand and counterfeit issues arise constantly and at scale. His earlier in-house and clinical experience includes work with Peloton and Agero, as well as the BU/MIT Technology Law Clinic, where law students provide supervised intellectual property assistance to early-stage companies and inventors. He holds a JD from Boston University School of Law, where he concentrated in Intellectual Property and Information Law.

Today, John’s practice is focused on federal trademark law: clearance searches, applications, Office Action responses, monitoring, maintenance, and enforcement, handled directly by him for every client, from first conversation to filed document. Every engagement is quoted as a flat fee in writing before work begins.

John is also admitted to practice before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the court that hears appeals from decisions of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, and before the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Together those cover both of the routes available when the Board decides a matter the wrong way, and they mean a federal trademark case venued in Massachusetts can be handled directly. The practical effect is that the attorney who built the record can also argue it on review, rather than handing the file to another firm at the point where the record starts to matter most.