Clearance
Perhaps the single most important thing you can do! We can conduct clearance searches for Trade Marks, Designs and Patents. We have a special bespoke tool for conducting world-wide trade mark searches. Please contact us for more information about this. Trade Mark and Design Searches There are hundreds of thousands of brands or designs out there; as such Clearance is about ensuring that you are not adopting someone else's name, brand, or other IP right. Perhaps more importantly, nothing which is confusingly similar, covering the same or similar goods or services. It is these last elements, which are the difficulty. Even if you innocently adopt a trade mark owned by someone else, the consequences could be commercially damaging, as you could be stopped from using that trade mark. You might also have to pay damages. Just think of the costs of amending stationary, signage, packaging; and that is before you have the difficulty of explaining the change to your clients! Searching can take many forms. Preliminary search: What we like to call "Quick & Dirty". This is often used when trying to select a new name and it is essentially looking for identical marks. Very useful if you have say 10 marks to consider, the list can be pruned down with "Q&Ds". Full availability searches: As the name suggests, this is much more of an in depth review of the proposed trade mark. This would cover conducting Registry searches for confusingly similar marks in related product and service areas. We don't just have to look at the UK Registry there is a EU Register and an International Register too. Common Law searches: in addition to the Registry searches it might also be appropriate to conduct a review of marks that might be in use, but for which no application for registration has been made; so wouldn't be found on a Registry search. This would include reviews of Companies House records, domain names and extensive reviews of directories, targeted at the sectors of interest. Domain Names: You might have already checked these, but we might see something that is potentially more of a serious risk than you perhaps realised.
