A trademark examiner is an attorney employed by a government entity such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to determine whether an applicant should be permitted to receive a trademark registration, thus affording legal protection to the applicant's trademark.[1] The job of a trademark examiner is thus to examine marks applied for to determine if they run afoul of any prohibitions on registration, such as infringing upon an existing registration of the same mark, or constituting the generic name of the goods with which the mark is associated.[2][3][4]