Services
We offer you all services around the protection of your products from being copied and the defense against IP rights of third parties.
Protecting your ideas
We accompany you in all stages of the life of your product. We are particularly involved in the "idea" stage, the "development" stage and the "market entry" stage to protect the product in the best way. However, we accompany our clients also later, when their products are copied and/or their IP rights are infringed.
...with registered IP rights
Our core business is the registration, prosecution and defense of registered IP rights, in particular of
- patents and/or utility models for protecting your technology
- designs for protecting your aesthetic features
- trademarks for protecting your signs and names indicating the origin of your products and services
This includes mainly the following services for each IP right:
- drafting the application for the IP right,
- filing the application for the IP right,
- prosecuting, i.e. managing the registration process of the IP right
- surveillance of procedural deadlines and doing maintenance payments
- enforcing the IP right against infringers with negotiations or in court
- surveillance of infringment
- negotiating, preparing and/or assisting with license and sales contract for your IP rights
...with non-registered IP rights or measures
Sometimes it is more convenient or better to protect your products by non-registered IP rights or measures, in particular
- copyright for protecting your artworks and software code
- unregistered designs for protecting your esthetic features
- unregistered trademarks for protecting your signs and names indicating the origin of your products and services
- Trade secret or Know How for protecting your secret Know How
- unfair competition for identical copies or other unfair practices.
Defending you against IP rights of third parties
Since the numbers of patents, designs, trademarks, copyright etc. has raised significantly in the recent decades, the question of whether your products infringe any IP right of third parties (also called freedom-to-operate or FTO) becomes more and more important. For example, startups need to prove FTO before getting financing and distributors need to guarantee that a distributed product is not protected by IP rights of third parties. Therefore, we support you with:
- Oppositions and nullity procedures against identified relevant IP rights of third parties
- topic searches to identify relevant IP rights for certain product features
- competitor searches for identifying IP rights from your competitor
- topic surveillances to periodically identify relevant IP rights for certain product features
- competitor surveillances for continuously identifying IP rights from your competitor
- infringement checks for certain IP rights
- license checks for identifying risks from license agreements, e.g. from open source licenses