Why you need us for registering trademarks and designs?

If you are interested in obtaining a trademark or a design you surely have visited the websites of the relevant offices like GPTO (DPMA), OHIM or WIPO and you will have discovered that they provide a useful guidance and all necessary forms you need for registering your trademark or your design. So why should you spend money hiring an IP-lawyer? Why shouldn’t you do it all by yourself, you might ask yourself. It’s true you can do it all by yourself. Most offices do not require that you are represented by a lawyer. But registering trademarks and designs by yourself bears a great risk that can most probably make the registration an extremely expensive adventure that might not even end with obtaining the trademark or the design. Here are four reasons why hiring us as your IP-lawyers is a good investment: 1. In Germany and Europe trademarks and designs need to match certain requirements. A trademark must be distinctive and not descriptive for the goods and services for which protection is sought. The trademark „chair“ for example cannot be registered for furniture, but „Apple“ can be very well registered for computers. A design has to feature peculiarity. That means it has to be distinguishable from yet existing designs. There is a wide variety of case law that define which trademark is distinctive and which is descriptive, which design is peculiar or not. Only an experienced IP-Lawyer can give you advice and guidance whether your trademark or design matches these criteria. Without consulting a lawyer you might risk that an office rejects your application. 2. Registering a trademark or a design always carries the risk of infringing someone else’s prior rights. This can lead to expensive and long opposition and court proceedings that you would rather avoid. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary before the application to conduct a search for identical of similar trademarks and already existing and registered designs. Such a search has to be done by a professional because a self-conducted search might be suitable to find identical trademarks. However, it will never cover similar (visual, phonetic or conceptual) marks. Without an experienced IP-lawyer you will also not be able to evaluate the risk of a similarity because in order to do that, experience and excellent knowledge of the office and court decisions are absolutely necessary. 3. If you need to protect your trademark or your design in more that one territory it is also extremely important to set up the right strategy how to register because on an international level there are different ways with different time frames and costs that lead to the same result. Only an experienced IP-lawyer that specializes in the field of trademark and design law is able to find the right strategy for you. 4. After you have become proprietor of a trademark or a design you want to make sure that no one else infringes your rights by registering something that is identical or similar to your trademark or design or even by using a similar or identical trademark or design on the market. Therefore, you need someone who monitors published applications and also the market in order to make sure that you can act against any infringements right on time to safeguard your intellectual property. Only an experienced IP-lawyer, such as the attorneys of LexDellmeier, is able to recognize infringements and suggest suitable means to stop them.