Trademark Clearance Search
to identify identical and similar trademarks to your chosen mark.
Trademark screening and clearance search with smart pre-selection
Once you have chosen a new company, brand or product name, you need to be sure it is really yours to use. We deliver targeted knock-out (screening) and comprehensive trademark clearance search reports with or without added legal opinion and advice. Whichever level of support you need, you can rely on our depth of experience to highlight potential conflicts that may not otherwise be considered.
Why undertake a trademark clearance search?
To avoid potential conflicts between your chosen trademark and an existing or pending trademark right, it’s important to ensure that your trademark is available and registered at the earliest possible stage of its development. Novagraaf’s comprehensive trademark clearance search services combine the cutting-edge trademark search technology of the Questel group with the extensive expertise of our trademark and design attorneys to deliver high-quality, targeted and actionable advice.
Practical screening services
- Pre-Screening: We provide preliminary analysis of potentially conflicting marks revealed by searches using Questel’s Markify clearance platform.
- Deep Screening: Our innovative Deep Screening service combines legal and commercial analysis to provide rapid business risk profiling that enables better decision-making and reduces costs.
- Full Availability: In high value and high-risk markets, we ensure that local counsel have fully addressed every aspect of potential conflict so that you receive a detailed and accurate report of their findings.
Novagraaf’s availability search checks against appropriate regional and international registries, such as the European Union IP Office (EUIPO), the World IP Organization (WIPO), and national registries, such as the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property (BOIP), the French IP Office (INPI) and the UK IP Office (UKIPO), as well as a variety of common law sources (business names, domains, web and social media).
Examines all trademarks registered in the name of a certain owner/entity.
If the availability search identifies a possible conflict, it does not always mean your chosen trademark can’t be registered. Depending on the jurisdiction and national regulation, you may be able to bring a cancellation action against a prior trademark right, if that trademark is older than five years old and is not in use.
Why Novagraaf?
We understand that many companies put off undertaking trademark clearance searches after becoming overwhelmed by large volumes of unsorted, unmanageable and often irrelevant data. To assist businesses, our ‘Search with advice’ and ‘Basic search’ services consolidate and analyse the results, providing brand owners with a clear, insightful report that will assist decision-making and take the pressure off internal marketing and IP teams.
Our ‘Search with advice’ reports include an overall legal opinion rendered by an experienced Novagraaf trademark attorney, summarising key findings, such as the ability to register, linguistic/connotation issues, availability, and synopsis of recommendations. In addition, it includes a per-country legal opinion rendered by a local expert that assesses the position of the potential trademark in all relevant classes, the likelihood of successful registration and recommendations for next steps.
All our reports provide a consolidated risk assessment chart by country for ease of comparison, including our ‘Basic search’ report, which provides a quick and cost-effective introduction to availability and potential conflicts across the designated EU countries.
Novagraaf’s trademark clearance search services are delivered using Questel’s powerful trademark search algorithm, which has proven to find "all" (+99%) confusingly similar trademarks and with less noise.
