Intellectual Property Law
You’ve worked hard to build your business. You’ve developed your name, logo, catchphrase, and other components of your branding and marketing campaigns to uniquely identify your business with the goods and services you provide to your customers. You’ve developed a proprietary set of goods and services and cultivated a unique customer list. You’ve created a competitive edge in the ways you conduct your business and present your ad copy.
Have You Adequately Protected Business Assets?
But have you adequately protected these valuable business assets? Should you be registering copyrights, applying for trademarks and service marks, filing for patents, and/or taking steps to adequately protect trade secrets? Ultimately, could you prevent others from capitalizing on your investment in the intellectual property that is the driving your business?
Not knowing the answers leaves you unprepared for the following nightmare scenarios:
- Imagine finding out that your competition has already registered a copyright and trademark for a logo that is substantially similar to your own.
- Even worse, imagine learning this via a lawsuit that accuses you of copyright and trademark infringement, and seeks to preclude you from using the very logo that you worked so hard to develop.
- Finally, imagine that the proprietary device that you built your business around has become so wildly popular that others are now manufacturing and selling, at tremendous profit, cheap imitations based on technology that you pioneered. Without patent protection, you may have no way of stopping them.
In today’s ultra-competitive business world, these scenarios are all too common because most business owners only start thinking about Intellectual Property issues long after they have committed to a business name, logo, proprietary device, and/or other identifying marks, labels, and technologies.
You Need To Consider How Best To Protect It
The fact is, it is never too early to start thinking about building an Intellectual Property portfolio as part of your overall business asset plan. While it is understandably difficult for a fledgling business to justify any additional expense, waiting is almost always a mistake. Wait too long, and there may be no way to prevent others from unfairly profiting from your hard work and ingenuity, and in the process diminishing, if not destroying, the value of all you’ve accomplished.
Your company name, logo, slogan, and other unique identifying features, proprietary devices, original artwork, ad copy, customer and vendor lists, and other valuable business assets should be considered at the outset as part of a strong IP and asset strategy that will forever link the goods you sell (or the services you provide) to your business in the minds of your customers. If you wouldn’t want your competition to freely access or use it, you need to consider how best to protect it.
Why Us?
We can help. Our IP attorneys provide trademark, patent, copyright, and trade secret analysis, counseling, registration, and maintenance services to a broad spectrum of corporate and individual clients, helping them develop and protect their IP portfolio from conception through registration and ongoing maintenance. And in cases of IP infringement, our litigation attorneys are well-versed in successfully prosecuting and defending infringement claims on behalf of our clients in both Federal and State court.
Why us? We are not only attorneys, but experienced businesspeople who work from a proactive, protective, and realistic mindset. We understand that a new business does not necessarily need to protect every minor asset to the hilt, at a cost that cripples the business before it even gets started. We get it – that kind of lawyering just doesn’t make sense. Instead, we want to make sure that your most valuable assets are protected at a level commensurate with their value. And when your business really takes off, and with it, the value of your IP assets, we can continue to work with you ensure that all worthwhile extra levels of protection are obtained, maintained, and enforced.
It is never too soon to start building a comprehensive strategy to create, register, maintain, and protect your Intellectual Property assets. No matter what stage of development your IP portfolio is in, our IP attorneys can help make sure that you’ve taken all the necessary steps to derive maximum protection for, and value from, your assets.
Some of Our Practice Areas
Our IP practice group is regularly engaged in the following services on behalf of our clients:
- Copyright Registration and Maintenance
- Infringement Claims Analysis and Litigation
- Patent Registration and Maintenance
- Patent Validity/ Enforceability Opinions
- Trade Secrets, Non-Competition, Non-Solicitation, and Confidentiality Agreements and Disputes
- Trademark Registration and Maintenance
If you have questions regarding an intellectual property matter or dispute, please contact Alan S. Golub, who oversees our IP practice.