What Does a Trademark Lawyer Do?

When a business works to develop a tagline, logo, slogan, or a product, these pieces of information must be locked behind a trademark to ensure they’re legally bound to the business that owns them. 

You’ll likely have spotted all of the various ™ stickers on a tonne of your favourite brand slogans, logos and brand names, and this symbol or emblem is essentially to let other businesses know that this particular piece of intellectual property is taken. 

That said, the people or ‘lawyers’ who take care of these markings are trademark lawyers, or attorneys. LegalVision Trademark Lawyers are an example of a company that specialise in this type of legal work. In many countries, the word attorney used in the field of law with regards to a trademark attorney or a patent attorney.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look below at what a trademark lawyer does and why you, as a business owner, should consider hiring one for your own workplace operations. 

Trademark Lawyer Qualifications

Before we delve into what a trademark lawyer does, we’ll take a quick look at a trademark attorney’s qualifications. 

As you might already know, a trademark lawyer is a lawyer who won’t or doesn’t need to be representing you in court. They simply work behind the scenes in most businesses to secure intellectual property rights and keep a close eye on whether you’re infringing potential trademarks or when other brands could be infringing upon yours. 

When it comes to qualifications, these trademark lawyers will need to have a license to practice law along with a registration with the Trans Tasman IP Attorneys Board. With these qualifications and a membership with the Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys (IPTA), a trademark lawyer will be able to work unrestricted with businesses on their IP and trademarking workflows. 

What Trademark Lawyers Do

Now that we have some information on qualifications out of the way, we’ll take a look at some of the most common tasks that trademark lawyers will undertake and why you may want to engage with one in your business. 

Keep in mind that contracted legal advice, especially when it comes to intellectual property, is integral to keeping all of your hard work protected and at less risk of being stolen by other competing businesses. 

Brand Protection Measures

One of the key workflows that your trademark lawyer will be able to assist you with is in the protection of your brand. A vast majority of trademark attorneys are tasked with developing brand protection measures to safeguard companies from being slowly eroded by rival businesses stealing intellectual property, logo designs, slogans and taglines and more. 

With these protection strategies implemented and all of your brand’s in-house designs and services protected by trademarks, you’ll be able to rest assured that you’re not running the risk of having anything stolen by other brands. 

To end, these brand protections will also keep your business more competitive in that rivals will need to work on developing their own products and services to combat yours, as opposed to simply taking them from you. 

Preparing Trademark and Licensing Applications

If you’re new to the business world, you’ll know that filing for trademark applications and licenses can be a little daunting and quite complicated. 

With a trained lawyer on your side you’ll be able to hand off all of these workflows to them and simply have your trademarks and licenses dealt with in the background. This makes it a lot easier to get a hold of all your trademarks and will make the process a lot less stressful. 

Your lawyer will be able to develop and fill in a lot of these applications for you and thus free you up to work on other aspects of the business.

Trademark Enforcement

If someone or a brand has stolen or infringed on a trademark of yours, you can then move forward with this trademark’s enforcement. 

As with the licensing applications, this process can be a little daunting and stressful, though not with a trademark lawyer working beside you. They’ll be able to take care of a vast majority of the processes here and have your trademarks retained. 

To end, this will also be an integral step to protecting your market share in a competitive market. The longer you allow a business to infringe on your trademarks, the more damage they’re doing to your brand’s image and the more time they have to confuse your customer base. 

Opposing Trademarks from Rivals

One of the final vital tasks that a trademark lawyer will be able to assist with is opposing trademarks that essentially mimic and replicate those that your business has. 

In a competitive market, you’ll need to work with a trademark lawyer to ensure you’re not having the nuances of your trademarks stolen, and with a trademark attorney working on opposing trademarks from rivals, you can rest assured that your business remains protected.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.