A Conversation About Trademarks That I Hate Having With My Clients
As a lawyer, I am all about spreading happiness. People come to me because they have a dream that they want to turn into reality. And I am into helping them do it. So it sucks when I have to have a conversation that goes something like this:
Me: “Just got finished doing a search for your trademark, and I have some news.”
Client: “Sounds great — what you got?”
Me: “Well, it looks like there is at least one registered trademark that is pretty much the same as yours and for the same types of products. This is going to make it hard to get it registered.”
The conversation is usually a little more involved than that, but I don’t feel like writing stellar dialogue right now. The point is that I sometimes have to be the bearer of bad news. As I said, I am all about spreading happiness, so I don’t like being the bearer of bad news.
Primarily when my client has already invested in their brand, maybe they’ve already spent money to have a designer do a great logo for them, perhaps they have bought domains and built a website, maybe they developed a social media following using their brand name. Whatever it is, they’ve put time and money and energy into a brand, and now I have to tell them that they have a problem. Maybe that’s why everyone hates lawyers.
