Trademark Clearance

The question

You have a new name for a company, a product or a service, and you are about to spend money on it. Design, packaging, a website, a campaign. Before you do, you want to know two things. Can you use the name without someone stopping you on the basis of an earlier right? And can you register it?

An identical name is only the obvious risk. A mark that sounds like an earlier one, or that means the same thing in another language, can be enough for an opposition, a refusal or a letter from a competitor's lawyer. Rebranding after launch costs far more than checking first. Our Academy explains what a clearance search is, and what it is not.

Start-ups choosing a company or product name come to us. So do agencies about to present a shortlist to a client, and established businesses taking a brand into a new product line or country. Sometimes the trigger is a letter from a competitor, and the question is how exposed you are. The depth of the work varies. The questions don't.

Our approach

We work in stages. An attorney signs off each stage before the next one starts.

We begin with the brief: the name or logo, the goods and services, and the countries where you plan to trade. Then absolute grounds. Is the sign descriptive, generic, or unregistrable for some other reason? We check that in all 24 official EU languages, because under Article 7(2) of the EU Trade Mark Regulation a ground that exists in only part of the Union is enough to block an EU trade mark.

Next, the search itself, through our clearance engine. It covers the trademark and design registers of close to a hundred IP offices. Earlier rights are not only on registers, so it also checks domain names, the open web, social media handles, online marketplaces and company registers.

Then relative grounds. We score each hit for visual, phonetic and conceptual similarity, compare the goods and services, and look for conflicts across classes of the Nice classification. How those factors are weighed is set out in understanding trademark similarity. If an earlier owner might be open to a conversation, we also check for existing coexistence agreements.

You choose the depth. A quick check is enough for an early idea or a shortlist. A preliminary search fits a name you are leaning towards. Full clearance is for a brand you will invest heavily in, or launch in several markets at once. Still choosing between candidates? We can first screen them linguistically in 36 languages, so you don't clear a name that means something unfortunate somewhere.

A clearance search with our advice usually takes one working day, at a fixed fee. We work with a range of AI models, including models we trained and fine-tuned ourselves, on our own infrastructure. That is where the speed comes from. Every result is checked and signed off by one of our lawyers or patent attorneys.

What you get

A structured clearance opinion. Each conflict is listed with its risk level, our reasoning, and the arguments on both sides. The opinion ends with a recommendation: go ahead; go ahead with changes (a different spelling, narrower goods and services, another class); go ahead and watch; or don't use the name.

If you have several candidates, a comparison report in Word, Excel or PDF puts them side by side. Useful when a marketing team has to pick one of three.

This is advice on risk, not a guarantee. A search finds what is on the registers and the web at that moment, and a favourable result does not bind someone who files later. If the opinion is favourable, you can go straight to filing, with the goods and services we cleared carried over into the application.

Next step

Send us the name, the goods and services and the countries that matter, and tell us how far along the project is. We will suggest the depth that fits.

Schedule a meeting or contact us.