Trademark

Taft’s Trademark practice offers clients a full range of legal services related to searching, registering, enforcing, and licensing trademarks. Our attorneys also advise clients on identification, protection, and licensing of trade secrets.

Trademark Searches and Prosecution

Trademark searching and prosecution of applications for trademark registration are traditional elements of our practice. As a preliminary step to a full availability search, we are able to assist our clients through online screening searches. For this service, we subscribe to SAEGIS, as well as the databases available through LexisNexis and Westlaw. Thus, clients typically have turned to our attorneys for assistance in formulating new trademarks even before seeking clearance approval or opinion letters.

Trademark Portfolio Management

The maintenance of our clients’ existing trademark registrations is facilitated through the use of a computerized trademark database system. Not only is the system automated to alert attorneys as to approaching filing dates, it has been designed to merge database records with form documents and letters to provide the most efficient services possible.

For clients with a large number of registrations to maintain, such a system is invaluable. Our practice handles international trademark matters for many of our clients. We assist clients in determining a strategy for globalization of their brand and related business.

International Trademark Services

On occasion, we work with foreign counsel already employed for other matters by our clients. We engage or recommend local foreign counsel with whom we have worked previously and who have demonstrated competence, reliability, accessibility, and attention to our clients’ needs.

Branding

Taft’s trademark attorneys offer a full range of legal services related to the enforcement and defense of infringing use, complying with advertising regulations and monitoring for dilution, and defending counterfeit claims. We routinely work with business owners, advising on IP-related issues, and when appropriate, integrate our legal team with marketing professionals to identify problems before they develop, not after.

Taft’s attorneys advise on issues such as:

• Rights clearing.
• International, federal, and state trademark applications.
• Advertising review.
• Rights enforcement, including internet.
• Domain name rights enforcement, including international arbitrations.
• Federal and state court litigation of trademark, false advertising, and unfair competition proceedings.
• UDRP and WIPO arbitrations.
• Counseling on trademark and branding campaigns.

Other services

In addition to trademark law, our attorneys advise clients with respect to protection of copyrights, trade secrets, unfair competition, and false advertising. We have experience drafting and negotiating licenses, development agreements, nondisclosure and other agreements for use with research institutions, employees, independent contractors, and other business partners of all types.

Attorneys from both the Litigation and the Intellectual Property practices work together in handling opposition and cancellation proceedings before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. To learn about our Trademark litigation experience, please click here.

Association involvement

Taft is a member of the International Trademark Association (INTA) and has served as host for INTA’s roundtable discussions concerning the right of publicity, trademarks on the Internet, and other intellectual property topics. Our team is also active in numerous other intellectual property associations and committees locally and nationally.