We are right by your side with our best-practice attorneys when you need to develop, protect and review your trademarks.
Trademarks Overview
Brands are one of the most important intangible assets of a business. Trademarks (names, logos, symbols, slogans, colours, shapes or even smells) render your products and services distinguishable from those of the others and make your products and services distinctive in the market. They deserve strong protection against competitors or potential infringers.
We are deeply experienced on all aspects of trademarks, i.e. clearance, filing, prosecution, oppositions, and enforcement. You will have a strong competitive advantage over your competitors thanks to our holistic trademark services.
We know that each client need different approaches, and we are flexible enough to show different approaches by our trademark team of strong background on trademark issues.
We provide full trademark services in Turkey. If you need to protect your trademarks in other countries, there are different options, country-basis protection, so-called conventional route, or you can think regional protection, EUIPO, ARIPO, OAPI etc. or Madrid System by designation of member countries of interest. You will have high quality services in international arena in combination with experience or knowledge of us and our extensive network of associates.
We can help you with:
- Searching
- Filing and Registration
- Opposition and Cancellation Proceedings
- Disputes
- Portfolio Maintenance and Review
Searches
When you invented a new brand for your products or services, you are most likely to rush into registering your trademark for securing its rights. Whilst that is necessary step to be taken, before doing so, it is important to ask your trademark attorney to make search whether someone else has already registered the same trademark in his/her own name.
Searches can let you save time and costs by preventing you from applying for a trademark application if any identical or confusingly similar trademark earlier registered or used by someone else is detected.
We can provide most proper strategy by our search services. We have different options considering your budget. We can simply list identical or confusingly similar trademarks for your assessment or perform comprehensive search report with our legal opinion in view of absolute and relative grounds and with a business perspective as well as risk evaluations before any possible conflicting rights.
Filing & Prosecution
Our trademark attorneys are hugely experienced in the filing and prosecution of trademark applications before Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (TURKPATENT). We are also experienced in International trademark registrations before the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
We are helping you in determining the right specification of goods and services by considering your business. If you would like to file application with specific goods and services other than class headings, we are creating list of goods and services for that purpose.
We can also assist you in which countries you should get protection for your products or services. In doing so, we are taking into account regional and international systems to enable you to have the most cost-effective route in securing your trademark rights.
While prosecuting, we can prepare and file
- letters of consent
- appeals to any possible official refusals,
- requests for limitations or withdrawals
When we get any official notices, we keep you alerted and reminded to take action.
You can also rely on our filing and prosecutions services in any country thanks to our extensive foreign associates.
Watches
Once you have registered your trademark, you can need to know if any competitor attempts to register confusingly similar trademark.
We can keep track of the published trademark applications in Turkey and abroad and notify you if any confusing trademark is published for your opposition.
Oppositions
Registering a trademark may not be as smooth as expected sometimes. Third parties can file opposition against your trademark application and we may need to defend trademark application.
You may also need to file opposition against third parties’ trademark applications based on a variety of reasons, e.g. earlier registration, well-known claim, bad faith claim or prior use etc.
In both instances, our trademark attorneys are hugely experienced to defend your rights against third parties’ attacks or violations.
While attending to opposition proceedings, we can amicably settle issues causing to conflict by contacting applicant or opponent, whichever appropriate. For providing a settlement, we can prepare and send business-oriented warning letters and responses to warning letters, make counter-attacks to find a common ground for a solution etc. In all instances, we know the art of negotiating and are highly adept at solving conflicts amicably.
We have good track record on managing trademark oppositions and you can rely on us.
Disputes
Disputes can arise in different ways:
- Someone may infringe your trademark rights or vice versa.
- You may find yourself in a cancellation action against your registered trademark due to non-use or genericity claims or vice versa.
- Someone may take invalidation action against your registered trademark rights due to earlier acquired rights or confusingly similar trademark registered earlier, or vice versa.
- In some trademark prosecutions, if you fail to get positive result in an opposition proceedings, you can wish to bring the case before the Courts by filing revocation action, or vice versa.
- Sometimes, you can need to fight against counterfeits in the marketplace. We can draw a good strategy how to battle against counterfeits in Turkish market.
Considering disputes are long-running issues, our priority is to solve the disputes amicably. If it is not possible, we can develop legal strategies how to win in court actions with our legal associates.
