Innadvertently infringing on another organization's registered trademark, can lead to customer confusion and years of costly litigation.

For brands who own existing trademarks, protecting your product and intellectual property against theft can be critical to your revenue and public image. Trademark search and clearance is an important component of modern business. Marketing and legal professionals are often called upon to search for registered trademarks to protect their employers and clients. Join us as we review why trademark search and clearance matters and share with you how to minimize the manual work and risk that is often associated with these processes.

While attorneys with a background in trademark law are often the ones who perform trademark searches, they're not the only ones. Paralegals, marketing professionals, and other brand management personnel who need to manage a brand's global presence or make decisions when naming new products or services, must also go through the process.

Trademark search has historically been a lengthy process, filled with risk and opportunities to make mistakes. For brands with limited resources, the sheer time of expert hours required to effectively execute a trademark search can be incredibly costly.

How Legal Technology is Revolutionizing Trademark Search

The era where trademark search is a labor-intensive process could soon become a thing of the past. Artificial intelligence and technology-assisted algorithms, have the potential to search, rank, and analyze a massive amount of information quickly and with better accuracy than human-guided research efforts.

By using technology-assisted searches to survey the worldwide marketplace, it's possible for individuals without an extensive background in trademark law to search, score, rank, and understand the true risks of the marketplace. Best of all you can have the ability to significantly reduce the time necessary to achieve high-quality results.

Minimizing Mistakes with Search Software

Nobody wants to suffer an infringement action. Searching mistakes made by manual efforts or poor-quality trademark search tools can result in unintentional infringement, which can cost hundreds of thousands in litigation fees and years of effort to defend.

In addition to a high volume of manual work, common mistakes associated with many search software options or manual efforts include:

• Poor quality results that don't inform decision-making
• Incomplete knowledge of the global marketplace
• Failure to mitigate risks because of inaccurate risk assessment
• Incorrectly summarized results because of the result quality

Simple results based on keyword similarity and wildcards aren't enough to protect your organization.

Brands need to filter results through context, which can include the likelihood of other brands in the space to litigate, national and international laws, and other factors that could be considered by global courts in a trademark case, such as similarity of distribution channels or products.

An effective trademark search software looks beyond results to interpret the context around queries. With the help of context, results can enable informed decision-making.

Speed & Mitigating Trademark Infringement Risks

Speed can be critical to protecting resources while mitigating risks of infringement. Gaining clearance to register a trademark has historically been a painful, slow, and incredibly costly experience. Even technology-powered searches can require hours of expert effort and analysis in order to correctly summarize results and assess surrounding risks.

Before your brand invests heavily in trademark clearance, it's critical to understand the full picture in a matter of seconds, not hours or even weeks. By providing a variety of individuals with the ability to mitigate infringement risks thanks to high-quality contextual reports, organizations can achieve intelligent insight in real-time.

Speed and Trademark Opposition Risks

When your trademark is under opposition from another brand, it's important to understand this information immediately. The results of trademark opposition can include a loss of market share, damaged public image, and other devastating threats to your revenue and brand reputation.

Simplifying Trademark Search is Critically Important

Trademark searches are more complex than ever before. With an increasing number of trademark holders worldwide, your brand must be able to quickly and accurately assess the marketplace in order to obtain trademark clearance and protect your existing trademarks against infringement. Without search tools that provide sufficient speed, accuracy, and context, organizations open themselves to litigation based on a lack of complete knowledge.

TrademarkNow enables brands to get the full picture in a record amount of time. With technology-assisted algorithms and the resources necessary to scan the global marketplace, professionals are able to use high-quality results to understand real risks in record time. For more information on TrademarkNow's products, click here!