Practice Areas

Trademarks

To protect your existing and future products and services, you should register the signs as trademarks. A protected trademark can prohibit third parties from using the same or confusingly similar trademarks for identical or similar products or services. Trademark protection should ideally be obtained before the market launch or before the first public trade fair appearance so that a third party is not quicker to use the good idea for their own purposes or even register it themselves. We support you in the preparation of the list of goods and services and register your trademark for you.

In addition to the classic word and figurative marks (logos), a variety of different types of marks can be registered: Slogans, combinations of letters, numbers and/or figurative elements, position marks, sound marks (sounds/melodies), design marks, colour marks, shape marks, motion marks, multimedia marks and hologram marks. The scope of protectability is wide and should be fully exploited to protect your products and services. The term of protection of a trademark is generally 10 years. The protection can be extended indefinitely for 10 further years at a time.

The registration and defence of German trademarks, European Union trademarks and international trademarks as well as the development, monitoring and optimisation of worldwide trademark portfolios is part of our daily work. We help you to obtain protection for your trademark in any country of the world and, if necessary, to defend it.

In addition to trademarks, other signs can also be protected, in particular company signs (company names and logos) and work titles.

Before filing any trademark application, a search should be carried out to make sure that no confusable sign already exists. In addition, we monitor your registered trademarks and inform you about new applications that could infringe your trademark protection. We defend you as a rights holder in opposition proceedings before the offices and in infringement cases with warnings, preliminary injunctions and actions before the courts. Conversely, we also defend you as an applicant for younger trademarks should an opposition be filed against your trademark.

In the face of increasing product piracy, we support you in conducting and accompanying border seizure proceedings. Our regular activities also include the enforcement of your rights in summary proceedings before the courts and directly on-site at trade fairs.