Letters of Intent

Pankaj Raval (00:05)
All right, everyone, welcome back to Letters of Intent. My name is Pankaj Raval and I am joined again today with my co-host, Sahil Chaudry Today it's us, we don't have a guest because we're gonna talk about something really important to all business owners and that is talking trademarks and brand protection specifically. When it comes to brand protection, we do a lot of it here at Carbon Law Group. We've dealt with protecting brands, enforcing the rights brand owners.

And today we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the importance of monitoring your brand. A lot of people kind of talk about, the importance of a trademark, but not enough people talk about monitoring brands. So is going to ask me some questions importance your trademarks. after you get a trademark, why is important to monitor it and what are some tools out there that can brand owners successfully monitor and enforce their brand?

Sahil (00:50)
That's right, Pankaj Today, you are in the hot seat. We are delving into a topic that is near and dear to your heart. It's a major practice area of our firm, intellectual property, and trademarks are at the core of your IP if you're a business owner. And today, we're gonna find out why and how you can ensure you're not sitting on your rights and letting your rights erode because that trademark is gonna be really important when it comes time to...

Pankaj Raval (00:54)
All right.

Sahil (01:16)
sell your brand or license your brand and it's time to cash in on all that hard work you've been doing. So Pankaj, I want to kick things off. Most businesses will register their trademark and think the job is done. But what happens if you don't monitor that mark?

Pankaj Raval (01:31)
That was a good question. People think that, yeah, let's register a trademark and that's it. But what a lot of people don't realize or find out the hard way is that if you don't monitor your mark, if you don't enforce your mark, you very well could lose your rights. Because if someone is out there using a similar name, using a confusingly similar name, and you're allowing that to happen for an extended period of time, it's usually a couple of you could well lose your rights in that trademark.

Sahil (01:56)
So, what are the different ways that someone could lose their rights? What's a situation, like a real world situation that we could look to so one of our clients could understand how they could lose their rights.

Pankaj Raval (02:06)
So yeah, Sahil, that's a great a real life example of how someone their rights. So for example, if you have a trademark and you've been using it for a while and now someone ABC for clothing, okay, and now someone out with a brand called ABC something and it could cause confusion.

Now the question is, you don't enforce your will happen? And what the law says is that you could lose your rights your brand name will be diluted and consumers will no longer your brand source of the goods. Now they could think it's with a different source and that would cause you to lose trademark rights because fundamentally that's what trademarks are about. They are source identifiers. When you buy Nike, you are buying a certain

brand, you're buying the goodwill of this company because you know the quality of the product you're getting, oftentimes the source, though Nike, guess the source could and has been, you know, come under fire in the past, but good or bad, know, the buy according to, what they identify with that certain brand and the goodwill that that brand has created. So by failing to monitor and failing to prevent others,

from infringing on your brand, you are allowing your brand to be diluted and you could lose all rights to that use goes on without you checking it.

Sahil (03:21)
So the CEO of Nike I'm the general counsel of Nike and I find out that someone on the street level who's created bootleg product that uses the Nike logo. If I do nothing, what happens?

Pankaj Raval (03:34)
So it's a good question, and it really depends on the size of the company too. Nike has market presence, it has additional rights. When you're a famous mark, you have additional rights, also subject dilution. If Nike does multiple infringers to continue to on and selling infringing goods, goods with Nike on it, we see a lot of, but if allow it to happen without,

taking any proactive action to actually stop it. an argument that could be said that, they are not enforcing rights, so they should no longer have their rights. is how people lose trademark rights. is how people get around trademarks. companies fail to enforce, or let's say even under or go bankrupt, now there's actually a good reason why they shouldn't have those rights anymore, because party shouldn't be prevented.

from starting a similar brand if they have this idea and this other company is no longer using it. a purpose behind that idea, but people need to recognize that if you don't a certain period of time, usually like two to three if you don't use your mark for even three years, effectively considered abandoned. So you need make sure that you enforcing as well as monitoring your and using it in ways will continue to use.

you will have to show to the USPTO. And one thing people also need to keep in mind is that every, after you register a trademark, after five years, you have to file this declaration of continued use. And then after 10 years, you file a trademark renewals. And that's really important to keeping your trademark rights alive.

Sahil (04:58)
So you're saying that once you file your mark, not only do you have to ensure you're enforcing your rights, but the USPTO has ongoing compliance requirements and you can't miss one of their messages or you can't miss one of the steps that they outline that you have to take to confirm you're still using the mark.

Pankaj Raval (05:12)
Exactly,

exactly, can't miss it otherwise you would lose your mark. They do offer some if you do miss it. There's ways to of revive always easy though, especially if someone else comes in and sneaks in and starts using the mark while it was dead while it was abandoned. could be facing battle there. So these are all things to keep in mind and this is where we as a firm come in and can really help our offer these different trademark watch services.

well maintenance services will clients those filings, update them on potential infringers, sure not important date. We all get a lot of emails nowadays, a lot of things to spam. we manage dockets of hundreds and hundreds of clients, global portfolios. we're keeping this in our own docketing system, in our own calendaring system to make sure that people know when

those important dates come up and we make sure we send you many, emails and calls and text messages to remind you that ⁓ these important dates are coming up.

Sahil (06:09)
Okay, so if I'm a client and I sign up for Carbon's trademark watch service, what do I get?

Pankaj Raval (06:16)
So there's three plans that we offer right now. It's a subscription and they're pretty affordable, usually between 29 and $129 month. the basic one, we just do just monitoring. We get you a a month of saying, here's potential conflicts we then you can decide to take action or not. And then that's generally on an hourly basis or a flat fee basis based on what we find.

you from there kind of goes up based on the the service you our higher level service at 129 includes ⁓ Some attorney time includes calls name clearances if you have other trademarks You want to register we could do some name clearances for you these are all things that you could look into if you look at our blog ⁓ And we are actually now creating another page for this again, but if you look go to our website There isn't more information there that we'll put in the show notes about

of these watch services, but we've a lot of clients really, really have found them very useful. to create something that's easy to understand and break the bank for a lot clients, but it was really important because we want to make sure that people don't lose their trademark rights.

Sahil (07:20)
What are some costs of enforcement after the fact compared to catching issues early? For example, if someone doesn't sign up for this and misses notice, what are the kinds of costs that could be involved?

Pankaj Raval (07:34)
You know, significant costs, you know, if someone tries to cancel your trademark failure to enforce, spending tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes trademark litigation, taking some new trial up to 300 or 400,000. I've seen higher, you know, some six or 700,000 in very large lawsuits because trademark and IP litigation in general is very much more complex than other types of litigation because you have to have experts involved.

a nuanced questions around what is consumer confusion? What are your rights? Was there actual use? Was there not actual use? These are all things that come up that are much more nuanced than you might see as a breach of contract action. So it takes a lot more experts, it takes a lot people involved in those lawsuits, can cause the cost to add up very quickly. So I would cost of not doing anything potentially risking your trademark,

is exponentially higher than being a little bit more proactive and making sure you're enforcing and policing your mark early on.

Sahil (08:30)
So essentially, if you sign up with Carbon for couple hundred dollars a you are essentially purchasing an insurance policy to protect your trademark. And if you don't do it, the flip side is you could end up spending tens of thousands of dollars to try to revive that mark or where you might be involved in IP litigation. There's a huge, huge cost to non-compliance.

Pankaj Raval (08:53)
Absolutely, absolutely. And this is what these bigger companies spend a lot of money on. They spend a lot like Disney, MLB, HBO, larger companies spend tons and tons of money and time and resources on monitoring their marks because they know how important it is to actually monitor their marks and enforce them. we wanted to say, hey, even if you're a smaller brand owner, if you're a smaller

is definitely affordable for you and we can help you enforce your is why made these different and watch plans for our clients because we know the importance of it, but unfortunately a lot of people the importance. So we want to make sure people understand and are knowledgeable about why it's important to enforce their rights and finding an easy way to monitor and help them in that process.

Sahil (09:37)
So, I mean, this sounds like complicated, very expensive. We're talking about complex issues, litigation, IP. Should smaller businesses care about trademark, or is this just something for big companies?

Pankaj Raval (09:49)
every business needs to care about IP. Every business needs to care about his specifically because is a brand asset. This is value and failure to enforce failure to protect your seriously undermine sale value, because now maybe you have less goodwill in that well as could create more complications. You know, it may say hey, if there's a dispute or an issue about your trademark,

now it could even prevent the sale because no one wants to touch a company in litigation or, the rights they're saying that they have. So it's really important that businesses, no matter the size are aware of this take action. And that's why we have, you know, these very basic plans to kind of plans for our their needs and their size.

Sahil (10:30)
You one thing I love about our firm is I feel like we take these kinds of mechanics of large companies and large firms, and I've seen you be very passionate about democratizing the tools that larger companies and large firms have for small to mid-sized businesses. And I feel like this is one of those tools that is so critical, but is usually out of reach if you're a small to mid-sized company. And I think that's, you know, just talking with you, I feel like that's really where the value comes in.

Pankaj Raval (10:53)
Yes.

Sahil (10:58)
If there's a listener who's listening right now, wants to take the next step, how do they sign up for the service?

Pankaj Raval (11:04)
Yeah, so you can go to our website. ⁓ We're going to be relaunching page. We're revamping it right now. But if you go to our blog, you can reach out to us the blog sign that we'll link to this the show notes about our Trademark Watch service. email us, know, email us, get in touch with us. You can text us at 323-543-4453. Super easy to get in touch with us and say, hey, I'm interested in the Trademark Watch

with us. You can talk to me or our paralegal Crystal, is our IP paralegal who handles a lot of these She could tell you everything you need to know about the service you get set up. So it's super simple. it's all on a monthly So you know what you're going to be spending every month as opposed you're paying a retainer or paying hourly for a lawyer. It's a fixed fee, a fee that should for the budgets of

something that we grow and scale. the benefit of working with us versus working with some other kind DIY service out there is that we're law firm. We can actually do something about can take action and give you tailored valuable legal insight into your service. services can't do that. And oftentimes they give bad advice or the wrong advice. So this is our experience.

me doing it for 15 years, a your trademark and we have many happy clients, proud to say, that have used this service, have used our trademark we can't clients or more brand owners.

Sahil (12:24)
I can speak to that myself. I am not only a corporate attorney with Carbon, I'm also a client. And you successfully registered our Raga and Raga Man trademarks, which was no easy feat. And it is a comfort knowing that I can speak to a real expert about this. It is very annoying when you work with these DIY services and there's not someone to talk with and increasingly you're speaking with an AI chatbot.

And you don't know the kind of expertise you're getting. You don't know how much time they're gonna be willing to dedicate to you. mean, it's very opaque. So I can speak to this myself. Carbon Law Group makes it very transparent. And I've enjoyed being a client as well as an attorney with this firm. So to everyone listening out there, do not just build your brand, protect it, keep it strong. This is property that you are gonna be able to sell. This is property you're gonna be able to license. You need to make sure you're treating it with respect.

and care, the same respect and care that you've put into building this Pankaj thank you so much for taking your time today. Thank you all for listening to this special episode of Letters of Intent. If you have any further questions about the firm, you know where to reach can reach us online on our website. You can reach us on like, follow, subscribe on our Spotify channel for more information.

Pankaj Raval (13:39)
Thanks lots, Sahil