Mallory King - October 24, 2019 - Trademark Law
At Traverse Legal, we aim to help companies protect their valuable intellectual property assets, including trademarks, by conducting Trademark Monitoring projects. Our “trademark monitoring” projects are custom designed to meet your needs, but typically involve a regular review of marks and domain names that could cause a likelihood of confusion with your brand. Our team has decades of experience identifying risks and opportunities for trademark owners and branding specialists. Trademark infringement can hurt your reputation with your customers, partners and harm your brand value.
We have the ability to search for potentially infringing trademark applications, trademark registrations, domain names, company names, social media account names, and websites. Our trademark monitoring team knows how to efficiently identify counterfeiting, infringement, unfair competition, cybersquatting, and other harm to your trademark, company name, slogan, logo, and brand. The scope of such trademark monitoring will vary depending upon your situation and goals. How many trademarks do you have? Are their slogans, product names, and other valuable brands that have not yet been registered as trademarks but deserve protection? What kind of services or products do you offer? How long have you been in business? How important is your brand and reputation to your business success? The first step for all of our clients is to develop a custom trademark monitoring project which meets your specific situation.
Consistent with our slogan “Changing the Way Law is Practiced®”, we work within discussed, defined, and documented legal budgets. Once we get your background information and educate you on options, we will provide our recommendations for your custom trademark monitoring project. And we always define a budget for your trademark monitoring project before we get started.
Once we define a monitoring project that meets your needs and fits within your budget, we set up your monitoring project in our various search tools, customize the algorithms, and start searching. After accumulating data, we review reports that identify unauthorized use of trademarks in whatever venues you have identified (trademark databases, domain names, websites, social media, etc). Once our experienced trademark team has reviewed and analyzed the curated search report, completed additional investigation, and reviewed high risk issues with the client, we can recommend an appropriate trademark enforcement strategy for each situation. Once we identify the high risk issues, we provide you legal options for addressing the issues (i.e. a Cease and Desist Letter; Trademark Opposition; UDRP Complaint; etc.). Search reports are generated on an interval you select (monthly, quarterly, etc.). New problems are reported and solved in real time. Once the initial clean-up occurs, and legacy issues are addressed, only the new problems get reported. By addressing problematic uses of your trademark before third parties get too heavily invested, you drastically increase the chance of issues being resolved amicably.
Traverse Legal has an efficient process and provides real-world return on investment (“ROI”). Most importantly, trademark monitoring adds asset value to your company and protects your valuable reputation. Identifying and putting out fires early often saves money, and increases the chance you will achieve your desired goals. Do you still wonder if your trademarks are worth protecting? Here are the top five reasons why clients like you chose Traverse Legal to monitor and their protect trademarks and brand good will.
Too often, clients learn about bad actors infringing their trademarks only after a serious problem has come to their attention through a google search, customer complaint, investor due diligence or through another valued relationship. Identifying issues early is critical. Your time is valuable. Let the trademark attorneys at Traverse Legal watch for problems in real time before problems become unsolvable, or the price of enforcement increases.
Did you know you can lose your trademark rights if you allow infringing uses to go unresolved? Part of owning and protecting a registered trademark is policing and enforcing your rights. If you fail to enforce your trademark rights against confusingly similar uses, your trademark could lose distinctiveness and you may forfeit potential remedies available in an infringement claim. Failing to protect your trademarks decreases your trademark value, and provides defenses to others who are infringing your marks.
The internet continues to grow and change. New domain extensions are being added all the time. You need to own the most relevant domain names similar to yours to create value for your intangible property and to preclude others from using similar domain names. Rather than just own one domain name, i.e. “YourTrademark.Com”, companies oftentimes have a domain portfolio. We can help you identify and register gTLD variations of your trademark (.com, .org., .net, .law, .insurance, .media., company, .pro and over 1,000 other extensions) and various spellings (and misspellings!) of your trademark.
Our trademark monitoring search reports reveal third-party trademarks at various stages in the trademark application and registration process. If, for instance, a confusingly similar trademark has received an Office Action, we can calendar when a Response is due to monitor the progress of this trademark to determine if action is even warrant (as the USPTO or other IP office may reject the mark anyway). Or, we may be able to see when the trademark will be published for opposition, so we can decide if/when to file an opposition or file an extension to file an opposition. Being able to understand where confusingly similar trademarks are in the process can save money on unwarranted action and enhance strategic enforcement.
Each month, our trademark attorneys monitor, review and make recommendations for clients just like you, protecting and adding value to intangible property assets just like yours. We have managed approximately 1,000 trademarks for companies big and small around the world. These clients understand the value of their trademarks, and the importance of good will. Now that know more about trademark monitoring, we only have three questions for you to consider:
Your reputation is your most important asset. We agree. Contact us to customize a trademark monitoring project that works for you.
