Trademark Lawyer for Startups

A business name registration (with a state or province, or through an LLC or corporation filing) gives you the right to operate under that name in that jurisdiction. It does not give you trademark rights and does not prevent another party from using the same name in commerce or from registering it as a trademark. A trademark registration gives you the exclusive right to use the name in connection with specified goods and services, nationwide (for federal registrations), and provides the legal basis to stop others from using a confusingly similar name.

Yes. The USPTO allows intent-to-use applications for marks that have not yet been used in commerce. The application establishes a priority date before your first public use, which is the most valuable protection a pre-launch startup can obtain. You must submit proof of actual use in commerce before the registration will issue, but the priority date is locked in from the filing date. The CIPO similarly allows applications before use.

Receiving a cease-and-desist after you have launched and built brand recognition is difficult because compliance now means a rebrand. The first step is evaluating whether the claim is legally valid: the sender must have prior rights, a mark that is confusingly similar to yours, and the claim must be within the scope of their registration or use. A trademark lawyer reviews the demand before you respond. Many cease-and-desist letters are sent as a first step in a negotiation rather than as a legally airtight demand.

Domain availability and trademark availability are completely separate checks. A domain registrar searches whether the exact domain string is taken by another domain holder. A trademark clearance search examines the USPTO database and related registries for marks that are similar to yours in sound, appearance, or meaning and that are used in related goods or services. Many names that are available as domains are already trademarked in the industry the startup operates in.

A professional clearance search examines USPTO registered marks and pending applications, CIPO registered marks and pending applications, state trademark registrations, and common-law uses in the relevant product and service classes. The search compares your proposed mark against existing marks in terms of similarity: sound, appearance, meaning, and commercial impression. The result is a legal opinion on the likelihood of a refusal during examination and the likelihood of a conflict with an existing rights holder.

A trademark application can be filed within days of the clearance search being completed. The filing itself is a single business day of work once the goods-and-services description and specimen (if use-based) are prepared. The USPTO examination process after filing takes 8 to 14 months for a straightforward application with no office actions or oppositions. The filing is what creates the priority date; the registration comes later.

You can file a trademark application yourself through the USPTO TEAS portal without legal representation. The risk is in the examination process: an office action for likelihood of confusion, descriptiveness, or improper specimen requires a legal response with specific arguments. Most founder self-filings that encounter an office action result in either abandonment or additional legal fees to fix what was not structured correctly from the start. A trademark lawyer builds the application to survive examination, not just to submit.

They are separate registrations but both can be valuable. The company name is typically filed in the business services or technology services class that matches the company's primary activity. Each product name is filed in the goods or services class that matches what the product does. If the company name and the product name are the same (common in early-stage startups), one filing can cover both. As the company grows and adds distinct product names, each product name with commercial traction warrants its own filing.

Common-law trademark rights arise from actual use of a mark in commerce in a specific geographic area. They are real rights and can be enforced, but they are limited to the territory where you have actually operated under the name. A federally registered trademark gives you a legal presumption of ownership and the exclusive right to use the mark nationwide in the registered classes, regardless of where you have physically operated. Registration also opens enforcement tools — platform takedowns, customs recordal, and TTAB proceedings — that common-law rights alone do not.

A USPTO refusal in the form of an office action is not a final rejection. You have three to six months to respond with legal arguments, amendments to the application, or evidence. For a likelihood-of-confusion refusal, the response involves arguing that your mark is distinguishable from the cited mark or that the goods and services are not related. For a descriptiveness refusal, the response argues for distinctiveness or seeks placement on the supplemental register. If the examiner maintains the refusal after the response, the next step is an appeal to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.