Most advice on choosing a lawyer is unfalsifiable. Look for experience, it says. Find someone responsive. Nobody tells you what to actually check, or where.
So here is the version I would give a friend. I am a patent attorney, and the first thing I would tell you is that the bar to file your trademark is lower than you think.
Key takeaway: any attorney in good standing with any US state bar can file a trademark. There is no trademark specialism to verify, no extra exam. That makes the license a two-minute check and everything after it your own judgment.
Check the license, and know what it does not prove
Trademark practitioners are attorneys who are active members in good standing of the bar of the highest court of any state. That is the whole requirement. The USPTO's practitioner page sets it out.
Patents work differently, and the difference trips people constantly. A patent attorney needs the state bar and separate registration to practice before the USPTO, which means a technical or scientific degree plus the patent bar exam. Neither track substitutes for the other. An attorney without that registration cannot prosecute your patent, but can file your trademark all day.
So "IP attorney" on a website tells you almost nothing about which of those two people you are talking to. Ask directly.
One rule catches people out. If you are domiciled outside the United States, an individual living abroad or a company headquartered abroad, you are required to be represented by a US-licensed attorney in all trademark matters at the USPTO. That has been true since August 2019, it covers filings, office action responses and maintenance, and missing it gets your application abandoned rather than merely delayed.
The four signals worth weighing
Once the license checks out, you are judging the same four things we score every firm on, and you can check all of them yourself.
Reputation. Not the star average, the shape underneath it. Twelve reviews across six years reads differently from twelve in one month. Look at whether the firm answers criticism, and how.
Experience. Years in practice, and specifically in trademarks rather than IP generally. Ask how many applications they filed last year and how many drew a refusal, which is a fairer question than a win rate.
Web presence. A slow, thin, years-stale site is not proof of bad lawyering, but it is a reasonable proxy for how the firm invests in its own operation.
Reliability. Do the phone number, address and hours actually resolve to a working office. It sounds trivial until you need a response inside a three-month deadline.
The method behind the score is published, so you can weigh those yourself or start from ours.
What to ask on the first call
Four questions, and the answers are more revealing than the credentials.
Who will actually do the work, you or a paralegal? What is your view on my mark's strength, given descriptive marks get refused? What happens to the fee if I get an office action? And will you run a clearance search before filing, or file on what I have given you?
That last one matters most. The USPTO fee is gone the moment you submit, refused or not, so an attorney who files without searching is spending your money on a coin flip.
What it should cost
Attorney fees for a straightforward single-class filing usually run $300 to $1,500, on top of the USPTO's own fee per class. Office action responses are typically quoted separately. A flat fee is not automatically better than hourly, but an attorney who cannot tell you which one you are getting is the actual warning sign.
Compare trademark and patent firms, scored on public signals, or browse the directory and check the four yourself. The point is not to trust the number. It is that every input behind it is one you can go and verify.