SHOULD YOU GET A TRADEMARK AUDIT?
A PROACTIVE APPROACH CAN SAVE YOU A LOT OF MONEY AND HASSLE
In the 21st century, intellectual property is replacing physical property as the most valuable asset class owned by many types of businesses.
Think about it...the most valuable thing your business owns may be its name, a logo, slogan or the name of your key product.
Despite this fact, most businesses do not devote any attention to protecting these critical assets.
Usually it takes a legal conflict to make business owners appreciate the significance of systematically protecting their brands.
Unfortunately, when a conflict arises, it brings with it a lot of cost and legal uncertainty.
Many trademark law headaches can be avoided if you spend some time with a trademark attorney identifying assets that would benefit from additional legal protection.
Closing the gaps in trademark asset protection can ultimately save your business a lot of money.
Consider the following typical scenarios:
Scenario 1: You are ambling along one day doing some shopping when you notice the name of your new product (the next killer app) on an MP3 player. You thought you had a great name for your product, and have already sunk tens of thousands into marketing it, but suddenly your world is spinning. Can you stop this company from using “your” product name? What if they were first…is being first all that matters? Can they make you change the name of your product, at a marketing cost of many tens of thousands?
Can they sue you and actually make you pay monetary damages?
Scenario 2: You get an accusatory letter in the mail, full of legalese and telling you that you have to change your company name and pay thousands in damages because your name is infringing upon the existing trademark of another business.
Can they make you change your company name?
Do you have to pay damages?
Scenario 3: Your company has been selling high-quality mittens with a distinctive striped pattern for many years.
Customers have come to recognize this distinctive pattern as a signal that the mittens were made by you, and thus are of high quality. One day, a manufacturer of a competing low-end mitten mimics your design, which you never took steps to protect via a trademark.
How can you stop them?
These questions do not have easy answers, but your legal position would be a lot more certain if you had federally registered the relevant trademarks and proactively managed your intellectual property portfolio before a problem arose.
Many problems can be rooted out via a simple and inexpensive trademark audit before conflict arises.
Every company should have a plan by which their brands are developed and exploited with appropriate legal safeguards.
A trademark audit provides you with strategic insight into the trademark process so that you have a better understanding of the necessary steps to protect your existing brands.
The bottom line is that you need to be strategic about trademarks -- what marks you register, and how you protect these marks after registration.
Your strategy must be dynamic and ongoing, and will depend on many factors unique to your business: the makeup of your competitors, the nature of your business, the planned expansion of your company and brands, the geographic scope of your business, and much more.
Obviously, there is a cost to all of this protection, and a lot of different approaches you could take to managing your trademark portfolio.
It’s enough to make your head swim!
Unfortunately, trademark law is rarely straightforward, and is more art than science.
Whether a mark may conflict with another existing mark is often counter-intuitive.
Whether registering a mark will offer you incremental benefits (for example, do you really need to register your logo, slogan and product name?) is also difficult to know unless you work with trademarks regularly.
In many cases, only a skilled practitioner who works with marks frequently can make an educated guess as to the strength of a particular mark and the value in protecting it in a certain way.
While hiring an attorney to manage your trademark assets is probably your most sensible option, hiring any old lawyer is unwise.
In fact, the vast majority of lawyers willing to give you trademark advice will fall into the same traps that you would, as they possess no more than a superficial knowledge of trademark law (and usually zero knowledge of effective branding).
Fortunately, the law practice of VeriTrademark is here to help!
OUR SOLUTION: THE $99 VERITRADEMARK TRADEMARK AUDIT
How would you like a skilled, experienced and knowledgeable trademark attorney to spend an hour with you discussing your trademark strategy…for less than $100?
Well, this is what Danny Bronski of VeriTrademark is willing to do.
If you are in Seattle, Danny will even travel to your office.
Return To Our Services to see how VeriTrademark legal services can add value to your business.
