Trademark Clearance Search

What it does

This is the technology behind our trademark clearance service. You give it a name or logo, with the goods, services and countries that matter. It then works through the same fixed route every time: intake, absolute grounds, search, relative grounds, conclusions.

An attorney checks and signs off each stage before the next one starts. The technology gathers and sorts the material. The legal assessment and the recommendation come from a person.

We work with a range of AI models, including models we trained and fine-tuned ourselves, on our own infrastructure, for legal and IP work. That is how a clearance search with advice usually comes back within one working day, at a fixed fee. Dedicated privacy gates filter personal data and confidential or privileged information out before anything reaches an outside AI model, so no outside provider can learn from your files or train on them. If that check cannot run, nothing goes out. Our platform is hosted in the EU.

We also use the engine to screen a proposed brand top-level domain against existing marks, before anyone decides to apply. That is where it meets our New gTLDs for Brands work.

Functions

Depth selection

Three depths. A quick check for early ideas and shortlists. A preliminary search for the name you prefer. Full clearance for a brand with serious money behind it. The steps stay the same; the number of sources, the amount of review and the detail of the opinion change.

Absolute grounds check

We test the sign against the absolute grounds for refusal: descriptiveness, lack of distinctive character, deceptiveness and the rest. The check runs in all 24 official EU languages, because a problem in one language area can be enough to block an EU trade mark. The attorney reviews every meaning that gets flagged.

Register and online search

The engine searches the trademark and design registers of close to a hundred IP offices. It then goes past the registers, to domain names, the open web, social media handles, online marketplaces and company registers. Everything ends up in one set of candidate conflicts, scored, and linked to the same owner wherever that owner shows up. You give us the sign, its variants and the classes. You get back the candidate conflicts, each with its source.

Similarity scoring

Each candidate gets a visual, a phonetic and a conceptual score. The reference is how similarity is judged in law. If the score and the legal assessment disagree, the attorney decides.

Goods and services comparison

We compare goods and services across all 45 Nice classes. Cross-class checks catch marks in other classes whose goods or services are still similar to yours.

Coexistence agreement check

When there is a conflict, we look for a coexistence agreement on record that bears on it. It tells the attorney what has been accepted before, and whether approaching the earlier owner makes sense.

Brand naming screen

Before names go into clearance, we can screen them linguistically in 36 languages. That catches unfortunate meanings, near-homophones, and sounds that do not travel.

What you receive

A structured clearance opinion. Every relevant conflict is listed with a risk level, the reasoning and a recommendation: proceed, proceed with changes, proceed and watch, or do not proceed. With it comes a comparison report that sets candidate names side by side, in Word, Excel or PDF.

Clearance lowers the risk. It does not remove it. A register only shows what has been filed or published at the time of the search, and the opinion says so. Our Academy explains what a clearance search covers in more detail.

Where it is used

Mostly before a new name is launched or filed, while changing course is still cheap. A favourable result goes straight into trademark filing, with the same classes. We also run it when a brand moves into new goods, services or countries, before a licence or an acquisition, and in naming projects with several candidates.