Trademark watching

With such a vast number of trademarks filed globally every year, it can be a challenge for brand owners to identify potentially conflicts in trademark applications in their key markets. Novagraaf’s dedicated watching department offers a range of specialist trademark watching services to help you both monitor and enforce your trademark rights cost-effectively.

Trademark watching is an automated service that monitors trademark registries for potentially infringing trademark applications by third parties. The service is designed specifically to alert brand owners with existing prior rights, so that they can meet the necessary deadlines for submitting objections (‘oppositions’) to challenge such registrations.

Trademark watching is also important when it comes to acting against conflicting use and/or applications more widely (e.g. bad faith applications), and for building up evidence of misuse to be used when acting against such conflicts. It can also be a useful way to generally monitor what competitors or third parties are doing, even if you do not intend to take action. For instance, by watching a competitor’s trademarks, you may be notified of a new application in a different industry vertical or jurisdiction. (Read more about trademark watching.)

How does trademark watching work?

Trademark watches for potentially conflicting applications monitor for applications covering marks or devices (e.g. logos) that are visually or phonetically identical, and/or confusingly similar. The results are reviewed by an attorney and provided with a short or detailed opinion, depending on the mark in question.

This analysis of the findings is based on the attorney’s knowledge of your prior rights and the likely impact on your business. By pre-assessing the results in this way, we can ensure that you do not receive pages and pages of watch notices, but instead only the important conflicts which we recommend that you review. However, it is also possible to organise for trademark watches ‘without opinion’ if attorney analysis is not required.

Finding the right support

As critical as trademark watching is, many companies put off trademark watches, as so many services in this area tend to result in volumes of unsorted, unmanageable and often irrelevant data that needs to be sifted through by the brand owner.

At Novagraaf, we understand the pressure this places on in-house teams, so we have designed our services to ensure that customers receive prompt and useful watching results. By predefining the scope of all watching work in advance – for example, goods or services, competitors, markets or word elements to look out for – we focus search results on only the most important assets and/or markets.

In addition, our trademark watch with opinion services consolidate and analyse results for you, so that you receive clear and insightful data that will assist with decision making, and with the important notifications and deadlines highlighted for your attention.

For further information, download our service description or get in touch below.