Trademarks

Trademarks – More Than Just a Name

Distinctive colors, sounds, packaging – there’s long since been more to presenting goods and services than just a logo: these days, some products have a whole brand world built up around them.

Get a permanent foothold in the world of brands and trademarks – we can show you how.

Choosing a Brand

We start out by asking lots of questions. If you want trademark protection for your goods and services, then we need to work out with you which name, which logo, which melody or which color is best suited for the purpose. We don’t presume to take on the creative part of the job, but we would be pleased to put you in touch with the advertising agencies we represent.

Our task is to assist you early on in your choice of a name or label that can be used to establish effective protection under trademark law. The comprehensive advice we provide includes recommending not only the goods and services that should be protected, but also the geographical area where protection should apply; in other words, whether it would be better to register your trademark nationally or internationally.

Trademark Verification

We review the choice of marks available to ensure that they are suitable, which means, first of all, looking into whether they are eligible for protection under trademark law. One of the main areas in which we provide advice is how to protect advertising slogans. We search for identical and similar marks and the areas in which they are used, so that we can reliably assess the legal position of the mark you want to protect. In this way, costly trademark disputes can be avoided.

Trademark Registration

We then supervise the application and registration procedure, no matter whether you apply to the German Patent & Trademark Office for nationwide protection, to the Office of Harmonisation for the Internal Market (OHIM) for protection throughout the EU, or to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) for worldwide protection. And if you want to register national trademarks in other countries, we have a whole network of colleagues abroad who will be pleased to help you.

Trademark Management

Registering a trademark is just the first step. But your brand’s force depends not only on it being registered, but also and above all on its acquired distinctiveness. Brands can be severely diluted if other trademarks are in circulation that are identical or confusingly similar. We would be pleased to monitor your brand by keeping a lookout for applications for identical or similar trademarks in the area where you enjoy protection, and we’ll deal with any procedure then required.

We would also be pleased to conduct the litigation for you trademark disputes before courts of law.

We can also assist you with negotiating and concluding trademark license agreements, coexistence agreements, and other agreements on acquiring or using trademarks.

Other Marks & Protective Rights

Apart from trademark protection in itself, we also provide counsel and representation in all other matters involving brands and protective rights, such as disputes about domains, or registering and managing design patents.

Where patents are concerned, we cooperate with a firm of patent attorneys located near the German Patent & Trademark Office in Munich.