Protect the symbols, words, or phrases, that are important to your brand or product's identity with trademarks .
Offering comprehensive and worldwide trademark services.
We offer a full range of intellectual property services, including consultation, defensive strategies, and proactive offensive measures. Here are some of the more common ones:
Trademark Strategy Consulting
What's the best way to protect your brand? Build a tailored plan for protecting and leveraging your inventions through patents.
Trademark Use Consulting
Equip and prepare your sales and marketing teams. Equip your marketing or sales teams with the latest guidelines in how to properly use your marks to maintain their strength and enforceability, as well as how to legally use your competitors' marks for comparative or critical purposes.
Trademark Portfolio Analysis
Get an appraisal. Review your trademarks, or someone else's to look for gaps in coverage, and value with respect to your objectives.
Trademark Field Monitoring
Searching for new threats. Get periodic alerts of third parties that may be using your mark, or a confusingly similar mark, without permission.
Trademark Search and Analysis
Is your preferred name available? Find out whether existing trademarks are likely to prevent you from using or registering a mark.
Registration Application Filing and Prosecution
Register your trademarks. We'll submit an application and defend it during its examination.
Ready to see what we can do to protect your brand?
"Many popular quotes are falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln." - Benjamin Franklin
Trademarks distinguish the goods or services of your company from others.
Consumers should be able to identify the source of the goods and services that they purchase. The law therefore provides protection against consumer confusion caused by deliberate or accidental similarity in the designs and/or words used in association with a product or service.Â
This principle was enforced by common law for many years, eventually supported by the 1946 Lanham Act, which established a uniform national system for trademark registration and protection, aiming to reduce consumer confusion, prevent unfair competition among businesses, and provide a clear legal framework for resolving trademark disputes.
Common law trademark rights in the U.S. arise from actual use rather than registration, so you may already have some trademark rights if you’ve been actively using a distinctive mark in commerce to identify your goods or services. However, these rights are limited to the geographic area where the mark is actively used.
Registration of a trademark, in comparison, provides nationwide legal protection, a presumption of ownership and exclusive rights, the ability to use the ® symbol, and easier enforcement against infringers through federal courts, significantly strengthening and expanding the scope of your rights beyond common law protections.
Trademark Timeline
Here's how we can work with your product development process.
Picking a Mark
Before you settle on a name, phrase, or design to use in commerce, it's a good idea to commission a trademark search to see if anyone else is already using it.
Before Use
Once you settle on a mark, we have the option to immediately file a registration application on an Intent-To-Use basis. This can jump-start the registration process, while giving you up to three years before you need to show proof that you're using the mark.
Use of the Mark in Commerce
Once you're actively using the mark for goods or services, you automatically have some trademark rights to it, regardless of whether you have registered it or not. At this stage, we can file one or more regular registration applications in any countries where you distribute. We can also meet with your marketing and sales team to provide a trademark use consultation to go over the guidelines for maximizing the strength of your marks, and avoiding practices that might weaken them.
Prosecution of Application
Once the registration application has been filed, we'll often need to respond to one or two office actions from the Trademark office. We can also defend your application if a third party files an opposition against it before it is registered. We'll keep you up to date on how it's going, so you can decide whether to continue at any point.
Post-Registration
Once your mark is registered, we can keep it active by tracking and submitting the periodically-required required maintenance fees and declarations. We can also defend your mark against infringement by monitoring your field for potential infringement, and preparing cease and desist letters or commencing litigation to protect your rights. If your mark is challenged, we can also defend it against cancellation proceedings.
Straightforward answers to common questions about trademarks .
What can a trademark cover?
A trademark can be nearly anything that helps a customer distinguish goods or services of one entity from those of others.
This usually means words and/or logos, however trademark rights can also extend to a product's appearance, packaging shape, product display arrangement, and even specific colors, sounds, and smells.
What can't be a trademark?
Trademarks cannot themselves be a product or service, they cannot be a generic term already in use, and they cannot be words that are purely descriptive of the product or service, unless the descriptive words have acquired a secondary meaning related to the applicant.
How long does a trademark last?
Trademarks last indefinitely, so long as they are in use. Registrations last as long as the registration is renewed, and ongoing use is proved.
How do you maintain a trademark registration?
In the United States, a Declaration of Use and Incontestability must be filed between 5 and 6 years after registration, followed by a Declaration of Use and Renewal Application every 10 years after registration.
How much does a trademark registration cost?
We currently charge $1200 for the initial registration application (plus government fees that depend on the number of classes of goods you want to register in). The cost of responding to office actions and other issues that may arise during the application process varies depending on the complexity, but examining attorneys usually only one or two office actions, and these will often be quickly resolvable, so the cost to procure a registration in one product class is generally only a few thousand dollars.Â