Webinar Topic: Trademark Practitioners: Scaling Recurring Revenue and Bandwidth.

Key-points covered in the webinar session

• How can we help Solo Trademark Practitioners while facing multiple challenges and sudden work load?
• How to optimize work without undergoing the hiring process?
• How to increase the business while using the available time effectively.

Key-note Speakers

Gopal Singh Rawat, Sr. Manager – Trademark, Sagacious IP
Melvyn Thomas, Head – Online Sales, Sagacious IP

Anchored By

Rahul Rana, Sr. Business Development Executive – Sales, Sagacious IP

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More details about this Webinar

Trademark practitioner like individual practitioner, sometimes when they get Trademark (TM) request and cannot handle alone also difficult to hire a complete team for a client request. An extended team come to the rescue and offer their whole experience and knowledge to the Trademark practitioner.
Sagacious offers the extended team for TM monitoring, searching. Trademark Practitioner need not spend on team hire, salary, the dedicated extended team do all the work.

Webinar Transcript

Rahul Rana: Greetings, everyone. Welcome to the webinar. This is Rahul Rana, Senior Executive Business Development at Sagacious, signing in from India to welcome you all to our webinar today on the topic Trademark Practitioners: Scaling Recurring Revenue and Bandwidth while Reducing Liability.

So, before I go on and to introduce this topic and the esteemed speakers on our session today, I’m delighted to welcome all the participants from different countries like USA, Australia, Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Japan, et cetera. So, your participation is a wonderful encouragement to the efforts and attempts that we are making to raise awareness and spread knowledge that has been honed by Sagacious over several years of working with inventor’s, R&D organizations, IP departments, and IP law practices.

So, our first speaker for this session is Gopal Singh Rawat. He leads, the trademark team at Sagacious. He’s is a trademark search expert, accomplished trademark researcher with an experience of 8+ years of searching and Sagacious is a 350+ patent or IP professionals in the business of patent search for more than 14 years. Welcome to the webinar, Gopal.

Gopal Singh: Thank you. Thank you for having me in the webinar. I am glad to be here and to be able to speak to the audience today.

Rahul Rana: Thanks for the introduction Gopal. So, next up is Melvyn Thomas. He is head of the online channel sales at Sagacious and he has an eight plus years of experience in managing sales process, and providing a high level of customer service and retention. And welcome to the webinar Melvyn.

Melvyn Thomas: Thank you, Rahul. I am delighted to be a part of this webinar, and I hope to talk about the things that this webinar is about and share the company’s views with the audience that is here and I welcome everyone who has joined this webinar, on behalf of Sagacious, thank you.

Rahul Rana: Thank you. Thank you for your words, Melvyn. Ladies and gentlemen, these were our speakers, Melvyn and Gopal. So, before we start off with the presentation today, let me ask our speakers to give some more information about our topic. Now, some initial remarks on today’s webinar topic that is Trademark Practitioners: Scaling Recurring Revenue and Bandwidth while Reducing Liability. So, to begin with I would like Gopal to give his initial remarks. So Gopal, over to you.

What is Recurring revenue and how can we scale them?

Gopal Singh: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you Rahul. So, the topic of the webinar Trademark Practitioners: Scaling Recurring Revenue and Bandwidth while Reducing Liability is really important and here we need to understand what is the recurring revenue and bandwidth for trademark practitioners, how we can scale our recurring revenue and bandwidth. So, Recurring Revenue is a model of business where the revenue is predictable, stable and likely to continue in the future. It is very important portion of the company’s revenue that is expected to continue in the future.

As we all want, the service offering, that involves less risk, but maximum revenue predictability. By offering services that your clients continue to pay for overtime you are creating an income stream that is stable, predictable, and super reliable. So here, you need to add a recurring revenue channels into your business. And in the trademark business, how you can scale your recurring revenue and how you can scale your bandwidth or can create an external trademark professional team without any liability.

 So today, we will cover what are the challenges of Trademark practitioners , what are the key benefits of external trademark experts team and what would be the best solution to deal with these challenges or Trademark practitioners so that they can scale their business, adding recurring revenue and bandwidth without any liability. Over to you Rahul.

Rahul Rana: Perfect, perfect Gopal, thanks for the initial remarks, and let me hand over the mike to Melvyn, so that he can share his initial remarks for the topic for today as well. Please, go ahead.

Why Trademark Practitioners conduct Trademark clearance searches?

Melvyn Thomas: Yeah, thank you. So, yeah, adding on to what Gopal said, I would just lay down the context of this webinar. So, trademark practitioners like solo trademark practitioners or patent attorneys from small sized, or mid-sized, or large size law firms, and corporate councils, they often need assistance for carrying out their research work on the marks that, they file for their clients.

For that, they look out for other searching options, companies, databases that can help them in conducting the trademark clearance searches, through which they form a legal opinion on the registered validity of the marks. And then they decide on the next steps regarding the filing, and filing it or not. And then after they file their clients trademarks, they often keep a watch on other similar marks that are being filed so that they can take the necessary legal actions to preserve the rights of their client’s trademarks.

So, an attorney or a trademark professional would not want to devote much of their time on screening the near similar marks for, you know, generating their legal opinions and watching their clients filed marks. So that’s why they look out, most of the times, they are like willing to use an efficient and an expert trademark search and watch provider for pursuing their trademark searching and walk by and watching work. So, there comes Sagacious into picture, so Sagacious acts as an extended team for those trademark practitioners by performing high quality trademark searching and watching service.

We’ve got a team of in-house expert trademark searchers who’ve been assisting attorneys and other trademark practitioners with effective trademark searching and watching service. We kind of perform trademarks screening as well as comprehensive searches and also provide customized reports to trademark practitioners and thus had them in farming quick legal opinions without wasting much of the time. And that helps them to save their times, as well as costs, and their time can be utilized in no other business development activities that they have, or other important tasks. So that’s pretty much about the context of this webinar from my side. So, back to you, Rahul.

Rahul Rana: Thank you. Thank you, Melvyn and Gopal, for setting the context of this webinar. So, as everyone has understood what we are to present in this webinar. So, before we move ahead and begin the presentation, I would like to invite our listeners to keep sharing their questions as and when they have it during the course of the session, they can share their questions via the go to webinar question box on the right side of this presentation window. As we move ahead, I will pick on those questions and ask them to our speakers after they finish their brief talks and we’ll be glad to respond to your questions and that you understand things.

So, apart from that, we also have an announcement that Sagacious team is offering an exclusive offer, we are offering a one month free monitoring service for a mark, or 25% off on a trademark search order for the participants of this webinar, so, the participants of the webinar can drop us an e-mail later at the [email protected] once the webinar is over and we will share it with them.

And, well, let us now get started with the main part of our presentation and for that, let me invite Melvyn to take us through the webinar and present the information over to you. So, Melvyn, please take the lead and this stuff.

Challenges faced by Trademark Practitioners

Melvyn Thomas: OK, thank you. Alright, so moving on to the next slide. OK, so it talks about challenges faced by trademark practitioners, so when it comes to filing trademark for their clients, the first thing that any trademark practitioner would come across would be to have a formal legal opinion on the register ability of the mark so that they can decide the next steps.

And for that, they need to get a trademark search done through the Patent Office databases, as well as check the general use of the mark in the internet search engines, journals, or other social media platforms, newspapers, et cetera. So, for that, they would not want to have their valuable time spent on the research work and would like to use a search expert vendor, or maybe pass it on to their associates or a paralegal, who can do the searching and then share the report.

And having said that, they would want to get a reliable search report as their legal opinion is based on the search results of that report and whoever is doing that search and is preparing that report needs to be a reliable resource for them. Because, if any of important, or close, or relevant results are missed from the report, then the complete analysis of forming their legal opinion can change and it can result into both money and time loss for them as well as for their clients.

So, making sure that all the relevant results are not missed is one thing. And also, the other thing is that they will not want to see any unwanted or junk results in the report, because that will again enable them to put more of their time to form those junk results and then move on to getting, to forming their opinion on the register ability. So, it kind of ends up wasting their time.

In a nutshell, I would say that they need a search provider who can provide them with quality search report, making sure no relevant marks are missed and at the same time, no junk marks are included in the report and it helps them in coming up with a quick and accurate legal opinion. So, these are some of the challenges that I have realized, which are quite common with the trademark practitioners when it comes to trademark searching.

Sudden increase in workload

So, moving on to the next slide, so, just talking about the trademark searching part and we see of many attorneys, they come up, they have sudden increase in the workload where it’s a kind of spike and there are many clients approaching them during some time. And at that time, they want to figure out how do they handle the searching work. In spite of having no team under them, they look out for other options where they can get reliable searches.

Hiring Professionals for conducting Searches

And at the same time, if they try to build a team, then, hiring professionals is another area of concern. Then if you hire trademark searchers and you have to train them and you know that also consumes time and energy. So, this needs a trusting company who can kind of run comprehensive trademark searches with quick turnaround and high quality.

And, Sagacious has been a pioneer in that and has been serving over 200 clients and they have been using Sagacious as a primary trademark search and monitoring vendor. So, any need they come up with regarding trademark searching and watching, they approach Sagacious for that. And talking about that, we restrict the results with nice clauses and goods & services can then capture the phonetic variations, language, equivalence of the mark in the search reports too. So, it kind of gives a full length comprehensiveness to the report.

And, at times if there are kind of common name marks, we see that there are too many results, so we also prepare a separate spread sheet, so that, they don’t have to look in the main report to get all the results.

Solutions

Using External Trademark Expert Team and moving the liability of the searches

Yeah, so, these are the solutions, basically using an external trademark expert team and moving the liability of the searches, that is one thing that can be done because you’re also not just outsourcing the searches, but you’re also moving the liability to the searching team who is getting the searches done.

And, I already spoke about the comprehensiveness of the report with the close, relevant results that are being provided, avoiding any junk results. And thirdly, we also customize reports based on the client requirements. We also do screening searches and AI trademark searches, which many of our clients prefer. Like for customization, there’s, I remember one of the client who wants us to search all the 1 to 45 classes for their marks, for whatever searches that they give us. So, maybe their client has a broader spectrum of goods and services, or whatever the reason is.

And, some of the clients would just want us to cover the nice classes in the searches and no other results. And there are some who also have a customization request there, where they need to see the dead results in one section of the report. So, these are just some examples the report can be customized as per your preference, and we can also perform screening searches.

Get comprehensive reports with close relevant results

So, by talking about screening searches, I was talking to one of the clients few days ago, and that client has been using us for conducting comprehensive US trademark searches for them and during the conversation, this thinking came up when the client told me that often their clients come to him with a list of marks that they want to register for, as their brand.

And then the attorney he has to do this quick knockout or screening searches by himself, where they end up spending like 15 to 30 minutes per mark for just doing a quick screening search. So, and then they give us the marks which are kind of likely to get registered, and then they ask us to perform the full searches for them.

So, our screening search can come real handy, because a screening search would cost 70 to 80% less than what a full search costs and you get the results very quickly from us. So, rather than a trademark attorneys or professionals wasting or devoting their time, I should say, on screening those trademarks, they can utilize our screening search variant and get the screening searched on. And then based on the results, whichever are the most likely to get registered marks, they can then have the comprehensive or the full searches conducted for those marks. OK, so yeah, that’s about it.

Challenges faced by Trademark Watch

Startups/small and medium sized companies not inclined in allotting budget towards their TM watch

OK, so regarding Trademark watch, I’ve seen that many start-ups or small and medium sized companies, they are not that much inclined in getting their trademark watches done or allotting budget towards the trademark watch because they are more concerned to work towards developing their business and products and their marketing and other things.

Focus is in brand establishment, building the products, marketing etc.

So, watching the trademark is not something that would come right off on their mind in the beginning because there are many other things that have to be taken care of. This is one of the challenge. So, the solution that we have is that, in fact, we’ve advised to get to our other clients, as well.

Solutions for TM Watch

TM practitioners can add TM watch as a service in their filing package

The trademark watch service, this can be added to the filing package that the attorneys offer to their clients as created as a subscription service for their clients which will end up in getting a new source of revenue, recurring revenue and at the same time, better engagement with the clients.

Create it as a subscription service for clients

Through a few recent conversations with my clients, we realize that they’ve been using us for searches, but they have not used our trademark watch services and when I talk to them about the trademark watch service, some of them, especially solo practitioners or small sized law firms, trademark attorneys, they kind of find it very interesting because they see that with our trademark watch, they can actually create a subscription service at their end that will kind of help them in getting recurring revenue from their customers and also create a source of engagement with their customers.

And with the kind of low pricing that we offer for an annual trademark watch subscription. It makes them think that let’s say, if we go out to their customer whose trademark has just gotten registered and they tell their customer that they are going to monitor the mark like every week for one year and review the results that are coming out of the monitoring.

Add a source of recurring revenue and better engagement with their clients

Then probably they’re going to send cease and desist letters to whoever is found infringing and for this entire service, let’s say they offer a subscription of X dollars a month or something like that. So, this is going to help them create a recurring revenue stream and also better engagement with their customers.And, at the same time, it also enables the trademark owners to guard their IP against any misuse of their trademarks and take the necessary legal action as required.

So, through this many of our attorney clients found this thing interesting and they have sort of added on the watch service as a part of their filing package and they’re kind of pitching it to their customers and then their customers have the option to either choose that add on or go ahead without doing it. But at least they can show that this is something that will be required, and it’s kind of important as well to keep a watch on your IP assets, trademarks.

And through this, I would also like to kind of encourage all the attendees who are here associated with start-ups or small and medium sized companies to think of allotting some sort of a budget in watching your IP assets too because we tend to be more focused and invest more on preserving or filing patents, trademarks for our businesses and enforcing our IP rights. But what’s the use of securing the IP, when we’re not keeping a watch on the misuse of it and looking at the steps that can be taken to stop those misusers and thus, securing our market share and revenue through it.

So, the next slide talks about some business and time related problems that often come up.

Business & Time related Challenges

Business Expansion

The business expansion is one thing that the trademark professionals look for.

Building internal expertise and investing on searchers/searching tools

They want to build their internal expertise and investing on searchers and searching tools can often lead them to invest on something which they can get from an outside vendor at a much lower rate, and they don’t have to even take the headache of looking out for people and hiring them and investing on those kinds of things.

Solutions

External team can take care of trademark searching/monitoring related work

Yep, so the solutions can be going for an external team that can take care of your trademark searching, monitoring related work, there’ll be time savings. You get more time to invest on other important activities, like business development or other things, and also are building internal expertise and investing on search or researching tools and training their team on performing searches or taking a subscription from high-end databases and paying them a high annual fee.

You might not even consume those number of searches which you get by taking a subscription or from those kind of databases. So, it ends up in adding up to their costs. So it’s always good to just go to a certain company and on a need basis you keep ordering the searches or the watches.

Time savings, you get more time to invest on other important activities like Business development etc.

And, example of a few clients, who have even signed a contract with us for bulk or high volume searches per month at a discounted pricing. There have been such examples and it kind of helps them to reduce their cost and increase their profitability as well as get some additional benefits like waiving off the expedited fee for some of the searches or getting some other jurisdictions involved in the searches at no additional costs, or getting some discounts on multiple jurisdictions or global searches.

So, we also offer these kind of engagement models through which you can get a subsidized pricing and enjoy the other benefits, as well that come along with it. And talking about global searches, there is one thing I want to share that we’ve kind of seen the demand going up in the recent past time, for the global searches. In fact, brand owners are getting more inclined and getting global searches done for their marks even though if they plan to file it in one country or jurisdiction.

 The reasons could be, because they plan to expand their businesses in the other multiple countries, or jurisdictions, in some time future or they also want to get an idea if there are other companies across the world who are using similar name for their businesses which maybe have them in their internal start strategies for further growth and expansion.

So, many of the trademark professionals who are using us for conducting maybe the US or Europe search have moved on in using our global search service because in a global search, we kind of covered like more than 130 plus countries. And with just a small additional price that they were paying for a US search only or for a search that were covering 45 countries.

Yeah, so, the next slide talks about our trademarks service specific websites, that we operate through, or promote our trademark search and watch services. So, if you can see, it’s www.thetrademarksearchcompany.com and www.thetrademarkwatchcompany.com. So these are e-commerce websites where you go and select the jurisdictions and the add-ons that you want to get included in the search and then check out and make the payment and place your order.

And you also have to create your own account on these websites and then you can access your searches, the search history over there, as well. So, this is an easy way of communicating or placing your orders. And I would encourage the audience to go through these websites and have a look and see how things are there and you can start using these website for placing your trademark search or watch orders.

OK, so that’s it. Thank you. I will now go back to Rahul, for the next proceedings.

Rahul Rana: Thank you so much, Melvyn, for the comprehensive overview. So, what we understand from your presentations now is that the IP industry is facing a lot of challenges while looking for trademark solutions and we are there to provide them the solutions and how we can assist them, and how we can provide them better solutions, as compared to just going through hit and trial processes, we are there to deliver them to ourselves at a bare possibility, Right?

Melvyn Thomas: Yup, yes Rahul in those lines.

Rahul Rana: OK, perfect, perfect. Ladies and gentlemen, this was Melvyn with his presentation and now before I move over to Gopal, one thing that Melvyn presented a bit in his last slide that Sagacious IP is a complete IP solution company. So, The Trademark Search Company and The Trademark Watch Company are our dedicated departments for taking care of trademark search and monitoring requirements. So, if in case you guys have any requirements and you would like to explore so, you can visit these websites.

And once again, I would repeat and implored the attendees to make use of the exclusive offer that is being offered to this current session that we are offering a one month free monitoring service for a mark, or 25% off on a trademark search. So, if you have any requirements on your radar, please feel free to make use of this offer, and make hay while the sun shines. So now, we move on to Gopal to take us through the next part. Please Gopal, over to you.

What is External Trademark Team?

Gopal Singh: Thank you, Rahul. So, the External Trademark Team, model approaches is the newest and most efficient way to make your business a success. And with this model, you can hire TM experts team from different geographical areas and as your in-house team without taking any liability. External team experts play a most important role in the success of start-ups, small law firms, and solo practitioner.

It’s the business model of outsourcing operation of your trademark search and watch work. As we know, having the right set of people on board is essential to the success of any business from a start-up to multinational corporations. And we know finding and hiring is a most challenging task for the solo practitioners, new start-ups, and small law firms, especially when considering the limitations of your local talent pool.

And here, the external trademark experts team, provides you the right people with the right skill sets and constant support over your projects. It is a dedicated team to perform and take care of your all on-going projects with 100% quality. They meet your client’s deadline on time and deliver all projects successfully. They are very flexible to do any iteration as per the client’s suggestions as well. This team is not a project-based and is not discontinued after the project ends. It is an on-going co-operation between you and external trademark experts team.

This team can be both nurtured to a bordering country or off-shored to a totally different continent. So, as per me, there is no right or wrong. The most important part is that the team, you decide to work with an extension of your company, which ensure great productivity, great efficiency, 100% quality and long term partnership. It’s about the external trademark experts’ team.

Key benefits of external trademark experts

We will talk about key benefits of external trademark experts. So, there are some key benefits of external trademark experts team.

The best hand-picked talent

Firstly, the best hand-pick talent, it’s a very difficult task. So, you don’t need to take part in the hiring process. You get access to international talent pool. You will get experienced potential candidates for trademark search and watch work through the field. They all are well-trained on trademark search and watch process, and able to manage, effectively work on each Trademark search and watch projects.

Focused and experienced TM searching team

Second benefit is, Focused and Experienced Trademark searching team. The team is assigned to your project full-time. They do not need to juggle multiple projects and can focus 100% of their attention on your projects. As a result, the team becomes an integral part of your company, aligned with your corporate culture and vision and work towards a common goal. They all are having more than five years of experience and completed more than one thousand plus Trademark Search and watch projects.

Flexibility in work iterations

And the third benefit is flexibility in worker iterations. So, this team works according to given instructions from the client, in the e-mail, and they try to cover all important aspect of the mark, if a client miss anything by chance. But still after successful submission of the project, if a client wants to change anything in the project or want to include any extra thing in the project, they are very flexible to do iterations. Although, iterations takes half of the project time, sometimes, they do iteration twice or thrice according to the client. But they are happy to conduct any iterations as per the client suggestions.

Transparent and effective payment model

The fourth key benefit is transparent and effective payment model. So, the team works on a fixed pricing model. There are no additional charges. Also, you will be able to plan your budget further in advance and can keep track your expenses better. You can also suggest your payment model which suits you to pay after completion of the work.

No-hassle setup and operations

The fifth, No hassle setup and operations. Setting up operation is a very big task and when you think about your business expansion, this team can take care of your trademark searching watch related operational tasks, and provide you Trademark experts with all necessary conditions and tools. So, they can perform the shared task at their level best.

An easy start with high scalability

The sixth and the last benefit is an easy start with high scalability. With us, you can setup your own Trademark search and watch team instantly. Moreover, you can scale up your business revenue, and starts recurring revenue from existing clients. You can start trademark monitoring services for your existing client those have registered trademarks. Here Trademark experts team will help you to conduct timely trademark monitoring reports for your clients. Also, you would be able to handle any sudden workload and big projects, as you know that you have and your own external Trademark experts team. So these are the benefits of external team.

Sagacious Solutions

Here are some sagacious solutions, how we can solve our clients problems or contribute in the success. Sagacious has an external expert.

Experienced external trademark searching team

The first, solution is experienced external trademark searching team. Sagacious as an external trademark searching experts team have 20+ experienced trademark searchers. The team has the capability to deliver 5000+ projects for different clients in multiple domains.

AI based and manual platform for searching

Second is AI based and manual platform for searching. Sagacious, providing best in the class, searching and watching services to trademark customers, we provide AI-based trademark search and manual search as well. Both the Search platform, we ensure that we cover all potential results, which can be a cause of conflict.

We cover trademark similarity search algorithm in our AI based trademark searches. This algorithm is the most accurate algorithm and finds all potential conflicts with less noise. In the manual searches, we take care of all exact, near-exact, similar-sounding variations of the work and other language equivalent trademark also to ensure each potential result. We cover individual words with other words in the required trademarked searches.

Provide Global or Multi-Countries Searches

And the third benefit, or the solution, is providing global or multi country searches. Yes, Sagacious provides wide range of trademark searches, which covers both global and multi country searches, as well. Also, we provide both Word and Logo search globally. We cover 133 countries in Global Trademark search. We have performed more than 2000 plus global searches in the last year.

Online Order Platform Available

Next, Online order platform available. So, we have online order platform available for our customers, so that they can submit their trademark request through online platform. Our online order platform is a very user friendly and easy to use platform. You can easily submit your order and pay them. You can order your project online through our TTSC website. Our website is www.thetrademarksearchcompany.com.

Trademark search cost starting USD 49

Next solution is Trademark search cost starting USD 49. Yes, this is right, our trademark search cost range starts from USD 49 per month depending upon coverage.

Trademark Monitoring Cost Starting from USD 4

Next, is trademark monitoring cost starting from USD 49. Yes, our trademark monitoring course reads from you is due 49 per month on your list of subscriptions, depending on coverage.

Reports can be expedited and delivered in 24 or 48 business hours

And the last solution is report can be expedites and delivered in 24 or 48 business hours. So, basically, our normal turnaround time is 3-4 days but if any client want us to deliver the report within 24 hours or 48 hours, they can expedite the search as per their needs.

In this situation, we take our clients project on priority basis and start working on it, so that we can easily deliver the report on schedule time with quality. Our team is enough capable to deliver this search report, within 24 to 48 hours, as well. On an average, we deliver 20% projects every year, on an expedited basis to our clients as per their needs.

So, these are some Sagacious solutions. And now, I hand-over to Rahul. Rahul, please.

Rahul Rana: Well, thank you so much Gopal for your presentation and this elaborate coverage. So, what we understand from your presentation is the benefits that most people get when they have an external team to take care of their IP requirements, their search or monitoring requirements and how Sagacious can be useful to take care of their needs, much more efficient solution for them.

Questions and Answers

Yeah, so that’s a very good, elaborate coverage by both Melvyn and you on this topic and I believe we are on a tight schedule as well. So, we should move on to our questions that we have received from the audience, because I can see there are a few people who are eager to get their questions answered. So, the first question that I have is for Gopal, and the question is: How do you perform your searches?

How do you perform your searches?

Gopal Singh: OK Rahul, so basically on a daily basis we receive searches from potential clients, their desire trademark is clear because they run the search sites and no results were returned. As we will see in a moment just because there is no exact hit for a desired trademark, before drawing that conclusion.

In fact, after conducting thousands of searches, over the last 10 years, spending hours on conducting each search we do and has no less than three different people viewing each search. We suggest using a good vendor or trademark search expert to conduct your trademark searches. Even using the tips, you can still miss things that an experienced trademark searchers specialist would catch.

So, as an example, to conduct a US trademark searches, we use national PTO, uspto.gov and go for parameters, one is trademark name, another is live and dead mark and nice classifications in goods and services. And the trademark name research is a very important thing or a part in the search.

As we know that the USPTO will reject your mark, or trademark if it is similar to any existing trademark, it does not have to be an exact match. Therefore, we run the search in such a way to find any similar mark that exist, but first we start by making sure an exact match does not exist, any rare exact match does not exist and similar sounding match does not exist.

And second live and dead marks, after the first parameter we look for live trademarks. Many trademarks are dead because they either were not renewed, the applicant fails to provide proper information, or there was a similar sounding existing trademark that caused its refusal.

It is always a good idea to look for similar debt trademarks also, because this can give you an insight on the criteria that why the examiner reject the mark and thereby see if it might equally apply to your desired trademark. So, keep these things in mind, we provide live and dead results in the search, nice classifications, as we know that all goods and services are divided into 45 classes, 1 to 34 are goods and 35 to 45 are services. We always try to cover related goods, classes, the provided classes.

For example, if a client provided us electronic equipments class 9, then definitely we will cover 42 as in related class in goods and services. Sometimes, we find goods and services in other classes as well. Therefore, we assume that irrelevant goods or services can be hidden in other classes, and we always run our mark with goods and services so that we can catch any potential conflicts, if it is falling under other classes.

Rahul Rana: OK, I guess it covers it really well. And we do understand this. And, I believe there is another question, because we are actually on a tight schedule. So, let’s move on to the next question. That is, again, for Gopal. And the question we have is that who does the searches and what sort of qualifications do they have? Like talking about our expertise, I guess experts that we use?

Who does the searches and what sort of qualifications do they have?

Gopal Singh: Yeah, OK. So our search team is well-qualified with good academic scores. They all are graduate masters in different streams. We have trademark analyst, senior trademark analysts, project manager and senior manager in the team.

With all the qualifications, first, we train them on trademark search and watch process. We associate one Senior Trademark Analyst with Trademark analyst for first six months, they groom them and help them to understand the process. They explain each and every necessary information with them and work on demo projects until they become perfect in search and watch process. Over to you, Rahul.

Rahul Rana: OK, that’s, nice and the next question that we have is for Melvyn, and the question is that, how does a Sagacious differentiates itself from other providers. So, in other words, like, what are the benefits of using Sagacious, as compared to other service providers that are out there in the market? Please, Melvyn.

How does a Sagacious differentiates itself from other providers?

Melvyn Thomas: OK, well, I’ll quickly answer this question. So, we have been conducting a manual trademark searches for more than five years now. And the team has developed some search algorithms over a period of time, through their own expertise, and through the various databases, the current state of the art tools that they’ve been using. And this, kind of laid the foundation of our team.

And we serve 200 plus clients all across the globe, including trademark attorneys, corporates, start-ups and other entrepreneurs. And they use us as their primary or trademark search or monitoring vendor. And I would say, I haven’t come across any situation where the client came back saying anything was missed in the report, or which caused them to get an office action or a rejection from the patent office, because that’s how strong our report is.

That’s how, our clients have been forming their legal opinions and then filing the marks, plus the kind of pricing that we operate through. We kind of charge much lower than other trademark searching databases which are out there in the market and with our improved reports which capture only relevant marks, I shared this before as well during my presentation of the reports are captioned the relevant marks covering the near-similar and phonetic variations and language equivalent variations of the mark.

So, that is one thing and then at the same time there are no junk marks on the report, which kind of makes it easy to form a legal opinion regarding the register ability of the marks. These are some features that make us out stand among the other competitors. So, in other words, solution is not just only cost effective, but credible as well, so, we at Sagacious can make sure that we are not just providing cheaper services, but best services, in terms of results as well.

Rahul Rana: OK, so the next question is for Gopal, and the question is that: how do you conduct your trademark watches? So, but what criteria or how you perform the watch?

How do you conduct your Trademark watches?

Gopal Singh: Yes. So, in order to meet safeguard, that your valuable marks are protected and enforced, we assist you in monitoring the mark for unauthorized and potentially damaging use. The intent of trademark watching is to prevent the registration of new trademarks which are identically similar to your trademark that may infringe a company’s existing trademarks.

Our trademark experts help you to address all unauthorized and potentially conflicts at its early stage. They cover, all newly filed and publish for opposition marks with the classes and goods and services. They perform Trademark Watch on weekly, fortnightly and monthly basis. We use National PTOs in US and Canada and paid databases for global trademark searches.

Rahul Rana: Yeah, that was not only just to explain that how do we perform, you also explained the frequency of the report, so that was actually the next question that we’re getting. So, the next question that we had received was that, what is the frequency that we deliver our trademark watch report? So, it answers that question as well.

Well, I guess there are a few other questions, as well, but we need to wind up pretty quickly. So, we are actually already extending the time over. I’ll say it just ended with this. I would like to first of all, thank you, Melvyn and Gopal.

It has been very wonderful suggestions and I’m sure that listeners were able to get a lot of information about this session and they were able to understand a lot of aspects of the trademark industry, the challenges and the solutions, and that’s how we can be of use to give them better services out there.

So, moving on, we have not been able to cover all the questions that we have received. Those, we were not able to cover during this session, we will get back to you with the responses, and we will get back to you with the answers for sure.

And once again, as I already mentioned, that the Sagacious team is providing an offer of one month free monitoring service for a mark or 25% off on the trademark search for the participants of this webinar exclusively. So, if you have any products on your radar, and if, in case you are interested. Participants can go to our e-mail [email protected] and drop us an e-mail and we will get back to you promptly with the best of our services.

And apart from that, I would like to extend a big thanks to all our listeners who had this start on time and finish as well. We will happily appreciate that you have been so patient with us and that’s a big round of applause to all of you and I would like to welcome you on our next webinar, as well, and attend such sessions, as well. So, please join us on our next webinar, and wish you all a great day. Thank you. Have a good one. Bye-bye.

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