Trademark Registration

In order to properly protect trademarks, it is becoming increasingly important that you register your trademarks and service marks in order to prevent other companies from adopting the same mark. Trademark registration provides important advantages to you including providing prima facie evidence of the validity of your claim to rights in the mark. This type evidence can be critical to, for example, stop infringers from infringing your trademark.

While trademark registration may seem relatively straight forward, there are numerous pitfalls for inexperienced applicants. Such pitfalls include correctly identifying the applicant and the goods or services, whether to register a word mark only or to include a logo version of the mark. Also, what is considered use in commerce may seem simple, but when approached incorrectly can add to the cost of registering a mark or increase the likelihood that registration will be refused. Relying on the experience of Mr. Williamson in searching and registering trademarks in a wide variety of industries can assist you in obtaining your trademark.

Trademark Searches

Just as with patent searches, it is usually best to do a proper, professional trademark search to uncover all related trademark registrations. While you can conduct an informal search, an in-depth search is usually best to find all marks related to your trademark. A proper, professional trademark search is more thorough and will locate not only United States federal registration records but also state registration records and in many cases common law users and international registration records.