• What protection comes with a registered trademark? Applying for a trademark on your company is not required, but doing so does extend legal protection that restricts others from using your exact logo or even something similar. Trademark registration enables you to set your brand apart from the competition and gives you an exclusive right to profit from it.

• A trademark functions as a source identifier for a vendor’s products and/or services, and it allows the consumer to distinguish the offerings of one business from those of its competitors. As a result, trademarks play an important role in eliminating consumer confusion in the marketplace.

• In order to be registered, a trademark needs to meet the distinctiveness criterion. We check if the Canadian Intellectual Property Office might reject your trademark for any reasons. We also analyze all look-alike, sound-alike, and mean-alike trademarks and pending applications to ensure you have a trademark that will not coincide with any previous trademarks. We will prepare the application draft and, once approved, we will file it on your behalf as well. Following a successful registration, your trademark is valid from the date of filing, and it retains the priority right throughout the process.

• Our legal team is ready to protect your brand anywhere in the world, ensuring global protection. The potential risk of office actions or any opposition raised against your new applications can be minimized by using our three-part strategy:

1. 1. 1. In-depth assessment of eligibility criteria
      2. Taking into consideration potentially conflicting trademarks
      3. Preparedness for potential office actions and / or oppositions

• There are two main eligibility criteria for a successful trademark registration. The first is descriptiveness. Essentially, a registered trademark needs to display a sufficient level of distinctiveness so as to differentiate a company’s products and services from their competitors. This means that highly descriptive brand names, such as Rome Pizzeria or The Best Wing Place, will be rejected by the IPO.

• The second eligibility criteria is similarity, how similar is your trademark to that of someone else’s? Any owner of a registered trademark has the priority to oppose new applications and as such, if the new application is identical or visibly similar that it would create confusion in a consumer, an opposition is likely to arise.

• Understanding the extent to which the brand name meets these eligibility criteria provides the very basis for avoiding costly mistakes in attempting trademark registrations that are virtually certain to fail. Moreover, it is this level of assessment that provides the basis for the remaining strategies that can be used to maximize the chances of a successful trademark registration.