The services you may benefit of, by contacting our industrial property attorneys, cover the entire spectrum of the trademark registration proceedings in front of RO PTO / OSIM, OHIM or WIPO (filing applications for trademark registration with RO PTO / OSIM, OHIM or WIPO; overcoming office actions; lodging oppositions; submitting responses to third parties’ oppositions; filing and pleading appeals) and also other proceedings which precede or succeed the trademark registration.

Besides the basic services offered to our clients, for registering and afterwards protecting the registered trademarks, the trademark watch services are a fundamental component of our services.

This kind of service arose as a natural response to the evolution of the economical and legislative life, generated by the subjective feature of the official examination, its omissions and circumstantial technical errors or human mistakes.

In order to prevent the registration of some identical or confusingly similar trademarks, it is highly recommended for the trademarks' owners to contract a trademark watch service which, in exchange for a yearly subscription, guarantees to notify any subsequent identical or similar trademark which is published for opposition purposes and refers to identical or similar goods /services.

Once the owner was notified about the publication of the identical /similar trademark and we are in the possession of his specific instructions, our firm draws up and submits with the Trademark Office an opposition based upon the prior right deriving from the registered trademark.

The scope of the watch service varies depending on the territorial extent of the registered trademark, as the case may be: Romania, the European Union, all the European countries or any other country or combination of countries. (Ask for a quotation)

Thus, for asserting the acknowledgement of the fact that the registration of a trademark does not end once all the procedural steps are covered and, eventually, the certificate of registration is being issued, the responsibility is being taken over and pursued by the trademark's owner, supplementing in a coherent and absolutely necessary manner the Trademark Office's mission to protect the exclusive rights granted upon registered trademarks.

Why do we call the trademark watch an absolutely necessary service? Because, according to the EU legislation, the Community Trademarks registration procedure (also valid in Romania) does not involve the relative grounds examination.
Respectively, the examiners do not check if the respective trademark was previously registered by another entity, as a CTM, a national trademark or an IR designating at least one EU member state.

Practically, there are numerous cases where community trademarks co-exist with national identical or confusingly similar trademarks, this leading to the reduction of the said trademark's strength, the weakening of its protection and a long term vulnerability.

If we also look to the fact that in the close future the Romanian legislation on trademarks will most likely be amended, according to the one which is currently being applied by OHIM, the trademark watch may be regarded, without any doubt, as an independent and compulsory step of the registration procedure that must be taken immediately after the trademark's registration.