Trademark filing and management
The protection of your trade / brand name or the name of your products and services as a trademark ensures you a monopoly on their exploitation: once the trademark is registered, you can prohibit anyone from exploiting it.
This is therefore an essential key to preserving your distinctiveness in your market.
However, registering a trademark is not a simple act: it is necessary to take into account the many existing registrations (and other signs such as trade names or denominations for example) and ensure a lawful and useful trademark registration.
Registering a trademark requires extensive knowledge and experience in trademark law.
Method for trademark filing
Gouache Avocats assists you in filing your trademarks, in France and abroad:
- We validate with you the characteristics of the proposed sign so that it is protectable (sufficient distinctiveness, association or not of the brand name with a logo /visual representation in particular).
- We help you choose filing classes and wording according to the Nice Classification and the practices of the Intellectual Property Offices so that your current activity is perfectly protected and to anticipate its likely developments.
- We check the availability of a sign by a prior art search on any identical or similar earlier sign.
- Based on this analysis, we define an optimal trademark filing strategy to achieve the most comprehensive and efficient protection possible.
- We then file for you with the competent trademark offices (INPI, EUIPO, WIPO and local foreign offices). Gouache Avocats has a network of proven intellectual property correspondents in many countries.
- Finally, we help you manage oppositions to trademark filings by previous trademark holders to have them rejected or negotiate and draft trademark coexistence agreements to achieve your protection objectives.
On the occasion of the filing, Gouache Avocats advises you on the organization and optimization of brand ownership:
- definition of the brand ownership strategy (who owns it: you personally, a company in your group, which one);
- drafting of contracts organizing the holding of trademark rights (trademark assignment contract, trademark license contract, co-ownership regulations, contributions in kind or in enjoyment, dismemberments of trademark ownership);
- publication with the Intellectual Property Offices of the acts affecting the ownership of the trademark.
Effective brand protection for the development of your distribution network
Gouache Avocats assures you of appropriate and effective protection of your brand. You avoid subsequent actions for invalidity and can in time defend the originality of your brand against your competitors.
Gouache Avocats ensures its clients optimal protection of their brand throughout their lives.