By Kurt Leyendecker

Perhaps now more than ever, it is important for a business to federally register its trademarks.  While a business does accrue trademark rights just through use and a federal registration is not required to establish trademark rights, the failure to register the mark can severely compromise the breadth and scope of trademark rights, and perhaps more significantly, subject the business to an unnecessary disputes and possibly an extremely expensive and costly trademark infringement lawsuit.

Compared to resolving trademark disputes and/or defending a trademark infringement lawsuit, federal registration of a trademark is downright cheap: typically $1000 to $2000 from start to finish compared with $100,000 or more to defend your trademark in court.  The real cost of resolving a dispute or lawsuit can be significantly higher especially if the resolution has you changing your mark.  Business goodwill takes time and money, such as in marketing, to acquire.  This goodwill is often tied in with your business’s identity or trademarks.  If you have to change that identity, interested potential customers who knew you by the trademarked name may not be able to find you. You will likely need to spend a lot of money on new marketing just to advertise your name change, and even then you are unlikely to be able to fully mitigate the lost goodwill.

Often, however, business owners fail to consider the need to protect their trademarks when starting out or when launching a new product.  They are often overwhelmed with seemingly millions other action items and the attendant costs. The issue of protecting their marks is often forgotten or relegated to lower priority.

Consider trademark registrations as akin to insurance.  While registration will not prevent someone from infringing your trademark, it will greatly reduce the risk in the first place putting the country and would be infringer on notice of your mark.  Further, if a dispute does arise, you will be in a much stronger position to defend your rights likely mitigating the cost, and more importantly, increasing the chance of a resolution favorable to you.