How the Las Vegas Jacks Locked Down Their Name a Year Before Anyone Complained

By the time the internet finished complaining about the name, the paperwork protecting it was almost done.

LV JACKS (application serial 99193799) received something called a Notice of Allowance — the government's signal that a mark has cleared review and just needs proof it is actually being used — on April 14, 2026. LAS VEGAS JACKS (serial 99227634) reached the same point on May 19, 2026. The public unveiling of the Las Vegas Jacks expansion bid did not happen until July 8, per Front Office Sports. So while Barstool Sports was writing that the name "stinks" and a 461,000-follower account was asking for something more impressive, Jerry Colangelo's group had already pushed both names through federal review, beaten a real refusal, survived the public challenge window, and secured that Notice of Allowance.

That gap — nearly fourteen months of quiet filing work before the reveal — is the actual story. It holds a practical lesson for any founder who has ever picked a company name before launch: branding and legal protection are two separate races, and you want to win the second one early.

The filing sequence was deliberate, not reactive

LV NBA Newco, LLC filed LV JACKS on May 20, 2025, and LAS VEGAS JACKS three weeks later on June 10, 2025. Both are word marks — the protection covers the words themselves, not a specific logo design. Both cover the same two product categories with word-for-word identical wording.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the federal agency that grants trademarks, usually shortened to the USPTO) sorts every application into numbered buckets called Nice Classes. Here the group claimed Class 025 for clothing — "Clothing, namely, t-shirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, pants, tank tops, jerseys, shorts, pajamas, sport shirts, rugby shirts, sweaters, belts, ties, nightshirts, hats, warm-up suits, jackets, head bands, and wrist bands" — and Class 041 for "Entertainment services in the nature of professional basketball exhibitions."

Two names, two categories each, filed three weeks apart under the same lawyer. This is a portfolio built to fence off both the short version and the long version of a team name before the public reveal. As of October 4, 2026, the USPTO's owner records show LV NBA Newco has exactly two filings on file — no earlier history, no unrelated brands. It is a single-purpose company, which is what you would expect from a business set up to hold the intellectual property for a franchise bid that may never launch.

The owner address sits in Overland Park, Kansas, matching the Prime Capital Financial connection Front Office Sports traced to Scott Colangelo. The attorney of record is Matthew J. Smith at Polsinelli PC, a national firm — not a solo attorney doing a favor. The $2,200 in combined filing fees, which IP attorney Josh Gerben told Front Office Sports was "very inexpensive" for a business that size, bought professional handling, not a do-it-yourself flag-plant.

The refusal was real, and it came from a university rabbit

Both applications drew a Non-Final Office Action — a letter from the government examiner listing problems the applicant must fix before the mark can move forward. For LV JACKS that letter went out October 2, 2025, and ran 31 pages. For LAS VEGAS JACKS it came October 30, 2025, at 19 pages.

Reporting that traveled with the July announcement described the applications as "initially denied." That framing is closer to right than most people assumed. Both letters carried a Section 2(d) refusal — the rule that blocks a new mark if customers would likely be confused about who is behind the product — and both refused registration over the same four U.S. registrations: 3038077, 3380147, 3686785, and 3715932.

All four belong to South Dakota State University in Brookings, South Dakota. Its teams are the Jackrabbits, and the school shortens that to "Jacks." Registration 3715932 (serial 77350157) covers clothing. Registration 3686785 (serial 77350264) covers entertainment services in the nature of athletic events. Registration 3038077 (serial 78549045) is GO JACKS, also for athletic events. All four are still live and renewed today, and the oldest of them was filed in January 2005. An expansion group that says it has raised $8 billion ran into a Division I athletic department that had been quietly protecting the same word for more than twenty years.

The examiner's reasoning is the part founders should copy down. From the LV JACKS letter: "'LV' is the common initialism for the city of Las Vegas. Thus, this wording is less significant in terms of affecting the mark's commercial impression, and renders the wording 'JACKS' the more dominant element of the mark." Same logic on the longer name — the examiner required a disclaimer of LAS VEGAS. The register now shows both disclaimers entered: no exclusive claim to "LV" on its own, no exclusive claim to "LAS VEGAS" on its own.

Strip the geography out and both applications are, legally speaking, JACKS. That is what the examiner compared, and that is what got refused.

What a 79-page reply looks like

Here is where a file history will mislead you if you skim it. Each response opens with a one-page cover form whose argument section just points to the attachments. Open the attachments and the LV JACKS reply is an 11-page brief plus a 68-page exhibit of third-party JACK and JACKS marks — 79 pages, filed January 9, 2026. The LAS VEGAS JACKS reply is a 34-page brief plus that same 68-page exhibit — 102 pages, filed January 26, 2026.

Anyone who read only the cover form would conclude the refusal got brushed aside in a paragraph. It did not.

The 68-page exhibit tells you the argument. When an examiner refuses your mark because one registered owner already has the word, the standard answer is to show that the word is crowded — that many businesses already use it, that consumers are used to telling them apart, and that the cited registration is therefore narrower than it looks. Polsinelli built that record once and filed it twice.

Our register data supports the argument. Counting distinct serial numbers in Class 025 or Class 041 whose wording includes the word JACKS, as of September 10, 2026, there are 34 live marks and 84 dead ones. Subtract the applicant's own two and 32 live third-party JACKS marks remain — BAR JACKS, FREE JACKS, SNAP JACKS, JACKS SURF SHOP, BATTLE CREEK BATTLE JACKS, and so on. That is a crowded field by any ordinary reading, and it is the same shape of argument that decides a lot of these fights — the same one at the center of Spalding's fight with MrBeast over BEAST.

It worked, and reasonably fast. LV JACKS was approved for publication on January 21, 2026, twelve days after the reply. LAS VEGAS JACKS was approved March 3. Both were then published for opposition — posted publicly so anyone who thinks the mark would hurt their own brand gets a window to object — on February 17 and March 24. Nobody objected. Neither application has an opposition on file at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, and both moved on to a Notice of Allowance. Arguing back does work more often than founders expect; the cure-rate data says how often, and Refusals 101 walks through the whole exchange step by step.

The status everyone is misreading

Both names reached a status the USPTO codes as "Notice of Allowance – issued." That is not the same as being registered, and the difference has a deadline attached.

You can file a trademark based on intent to use — you plan to use the name but have not sold anything under it yet. That is what a not-yet-existing basketball team has to do. When one of those applications clears review, the government does not register it outright. It sends the Notice of Allowance and then waits for a Statement of Use, the sworn filing that proves the name is actually on real products for sale. Until that lands there is no registration number and no registration date. Both Jacks records confirm it: both fields are blank, and the government's own event note reads "SOU required from applicant."

The clock is specific. Six months from the Notice of Allowance to file the Statement of Use or buy more time, then up to five six-month extensions at $125 per class, capped at 36 months from the Notice of Allowance. LV JACKS has already used the first of those. Its original deadline was October 14, 2026; on September 10, 2026, the group filed its first extension request and the USPTO granted it, which moves the LV JACKS deadline to about April 14, 2027. That leaves LAS VEGAS JACKS as the name with a deadline this year: November 19, 2026. As of October 4, 2026, the register shows no Statement of Use and no extension request on that application. The last thing that happened on its file is the Notice of Allowance itself.

The deadline does not care whether the NBA ever votes

This is where franchise uncertainty collides with trademark mechanics. The NBA's Board of Governors voted in March 2026 only to explore expansion into Las Vegas and Seattle. There is no team and no guaranteed franchise, and Colangelo's group, which has since partnered with Bill Foley, is one of three Las Vegas finalists ESPN reported on September 29, alongside Steve Apostolopoulos and Marc Lasry, and Nancy Walton Laurie and Bill Laurie. The process has moved since July: bidders submitted preliminary information to the league and its bankers in August, Las Vegas groups faced a further submission deadline in September, and commissioner Adam Silver has said he hopes to decide by the end of 2026 while declining to promise any team at all.

The trademark deadline runs on its own calendar regardless. November 19 arrives for LAS VEGAS JACKS whether or not the NBA has voted. An extension moves the date, as it just did for LV JACKS, but the whole runway still ends 36 months after the Notice of Allowance.

That is exactly why the clothing category is in there. Selling even a modest run of LV JACKS t-shirts and hats is real use for Class 025, which can carry that half of each application to registration no matter what happens with the basketball team. The Class 041 "professional basketball exhibitions" services cannot register until those services are actually being provided. Filing clothing and services together in each name is an insurance policy: the merchandise keeps the brand protected while the team question stays open, and extensions buy up to three years on the services side.

Why this is a business skill, not a legal footnote

Strip away the celebrity ownership and this is a clinic in locking down a brand before you announce it. A group that says it has raised $8 billion spent $2,200 to claim both versions of the name across the categories that matter, more than a year before going public, then spent real lawyer hours beating a refusal before the public reveal.

Four things any founder can copy. File before the reveal, so anyone who files the same name after you is examined behind you, not ahead of you (the main exception is someone who was already using it before you filed). Claim more than one variant if customers will use more than one. Expect a refusal and budget for the answer — the cheap part is filing, and the response here ran 79 and 102 pages. And understand that "approved" and "registered" are different words: a mark sitting at Notice of Allowance still has homework and a dated deadline, one your launch schedule does not control.

One more habit worth stealing, this one about research rather than filing. Search the word that actually carries your mark, not the whole phrase. Searching "VEGAS JACKS" in those two categories returns two results: this group’s own LAS VEGAS JACKS, and a craps-instruction mark that has been dead since 2022. Searching JACKS in the same two categories returns 118. The examiner searched the second way, which is why a South Dakota university showed up in a Las Vegas basketball file. We have made a related search mistake in print before, when we searched by owner name instead of by the words of the mark.

GleanMark users tracking naming conflicts in sports and apparel can watch the JACKS family and LV NBA Newco's two applications and get an alert, usually within a day, when the Statement of Use or the next extension request is filed — rather than reading about it in a press release a year later.

This analysis is based on public USPTO records and is not legal advice.