We provide advice on legal matters relating to trademark and copyright law, government regulations, and advertising. Protecting your brand is important to your business. We can help.
We can assist with the administration of your company’s intellectual property portfolio and file trademark applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, respond to Office Actions, and represent your company in proceedings before the Trademark Trial & Appeal Board.
We have experience in developing company-wide IP and trademark programs, defending against infringement claims, and coordinating strategy for intellectual property protection.
Protecting your brand is important.
We can help.
Trademark work we handle
Clearance and registrability opinions
Before a client spends money on packaging, signage, or a domain, we search the USPTO register, common-law sources, and other records, and then give a read on two separate questions that clients often collapse into one: can you register this mark, and can you safely use it. A mark can be perfectly registrable and still walk into an infringement claim from a senior common-law user who never registered anything. Clearance is the cheapest stage of a trademark dispute, and the only one where the answer can still be “pick a different name.”
Federal applications
We file and prosecute applications through the USPTO on all of the available bases. Choosing the basis, drafting the identification of goods and services, and selecting the classes are the decisions that determine both the cost of the filing and the scope of what you end up owning.
Office action responses
A refusal is normal, not fatal. We respond to likelihood-of-confusion refusals under Section 2(d), descriptiveness and genericness refusals under Section 2(e), specimen and identification objections, and requests for disclaimers — including consent and coexistence agreements negotiated with the owner of a cited registration, which sometimes is the fastest way past a 2(d) refusal.
TTAB proceedings
Oppositions, cancellations, and ex parte appeals before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, plus the newer non-use tools created by the Trademark Modernization Act, such as ex parte expungement and reexamination, which can clear a dead registration out of the way without a full adversarial proceeding.
Enforcement and defense
Demand letters, negotiated coexistence and settlement agreements, platform takedowns (Amazon, Etsy, Meta, Shopify), domain disputes under the UDRP, recordation with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and infringement litigation. We also defend companies that have received a demand letter, where the first question is usually whether the sender’s mark is as strong as the letter claims.
Portfolio, licensing, and transactions
Docketing and maintenance for multi-brand portfolios, license and franchise agreements with the quality-control provisions that keep a license from being a naked license, assignments, security interests, and the trademark and copyright schedules and representations in asset purchase agreements.
Patents
We do not prosecute patent applications — that requires registration before the USPTO patent bar, which Ryan Luft does not hold. When a client needs patent counsel we bring in a registered patent attorney and continue handling the surrounding brand, licensing, contract, and business issues.