Brand Protection

Trademark Registration, Maintenance & Renewal

We provide strategic, cost-effective guidance throughout all aspects of the trademark registration process, including prosecution, maintenance, and renewals. We work closely with you to understand your priorities and give you customized advice that furthers your goals. We represent clients in opposition, cancellation, and non-use proceedings. Our sophisticated docketing platform allows us to provide tailored reports and analytics and gives you direct access to information regarding your marks and pending matters.

Trademark Clearance Searches

Our in-house search team has decades of experience determining whether a proposed mark is available for use and registration. When appropriate, our team works closely with other search firms and attorneys in other countries to conduct investigations for clearance outside of the United States.

Trademark Watching & Policing

We’ll work with you to monitor trademark misuse across multiple online platforms and foreign trademark offices, identifying attempts to use or register confusingly similar marks. Our team will help you develop specific strategies and protocols to address and oppose problematic trademark use, applications, and registrations.

Trade Dress Rights

We have significant experience with securing registrations for trade dress in the U.S. and internationally. We’ll advise you as to the best form of protection for your product or design, which may involve trademark, copyright, or patent protection, enforcing trade dress rights before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, in federal court, and in international tribunals.

Licensing & Merchandising

We’ll help you establish licensing and merchandising programs that communicate brand value, increase consumer awareness, promote long-term brand viability, and generate royalties. Our lawyers will help you navigate compliance issues, and can assist with strategic planning, negotiation, due diligence, and hands-on program management.

Preserve and protect your valuable rights and the goodwill associated with your trademarks. Our trademark attorneys are often able to resolve disputes without the need for litigation through negotiation with the assistance of government entities such as the U.S. and foreign Customs Offices. We’ll help you build a reputation that deters potential infringers. A strong trademark enforcement program helps you preserve and protect your rights and the goodwill associated with your marks. We are often able to resolve disputes without the need for litigation. Through negotiation, with the assistance of the government (for example, the U.S. and foreign Customs Offices), and by helping our clients build a reputation that deters potential infringers, we successfully help brands enforce their trademark rights.

When litigation is necessary, our team offers experience and savvy to address all types of trademark infringement, dilution, and unfair competition cases.

Advertising Campaigns

Launch your marketing campaigns with confidence. We’ll review all aspects of your campaign from securing rights and licenses, validating claims, handling the agreements for successful activations, and helping you to capitalize on consumer engagement and social media opportunities.

Promotions

Looking to include user-generated content and audience engagement in your next promotion? Our team has helped clients like you structure and execute hundreds of effective and compliant consumer promotions, contests, and sweepstakes as well as charitable co-promotions, rebates, gift-with-purchase offers, and loyalty programs.

Defense

We’ll defend your advertisements, promotions, and claims against challenges brought by government regulators, consumers, and competitors. We’ll also help you take action in court and before the National Advertising Division when your competitors are using false advertisements or misleading claims in the marketplace.

Protect your brand assets online with respect to matters relating to domain names. We’ll help you address new top-level domain names and set priorities for enforcement actions. We have successfully enforced our clients’ rights through litigation as well as dispute resolution policies, including ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS). When possible, we negotiate resolutions without escalation to formal proceedings.

We are also well versed in the legal issues involving the use and misuse of trademarks in domain names, website content, linking, metatags, keyword advertising, blogs, social media, and online retail and auction sites. We’ll help you develop guidelines and strategies to address trademark use and misuse in these arenas.

Our copyright attorneys work with clients who own, manage, and use copyrightable content. We represent entertainment and software companies, authors, artists, and others who wish to protect their original work from unauthorized exploitation by other parties. We’ll also help you identify your rights and responsibilities with respect to using copyrighted works, including assessing “fair use.”

We provide counsel on the full range of copyright issues, including filing and prosecution of copyright applications; acquisition, disposition, and licensing of copyrighted works; preparing and negotiating development and work-for-hire agreements; advising on compliance, including with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and fair use issues; and enforcement and defense of your rights.