Managing large trademark portfolios

At Knijff Trademark Attorneys we are specialists in the management of large trademark portfolios, offering dedicated services to support portfolio owners.

Services

Knijff Trademark Attorneys developed the following strategic services for clients.

  • The management of large trademark portfolios requires expertise.

    Knijff houses all the expertise needed to help you manage sizeable portfolios and their obvious challenges.

    Answers to questions like: should a trademark be registered to the operating company or rather to the holding? Or may subsidiaries always use the trademarks registered by the parent company?

    Knowing exactly how best to manage large portfolios & acting as your hub in a network of local agents, operating companies and you.

    Additionally, we can draw up brand books and -manuals to serve as guidelines. Ensuring your businesses of the correct use of their trademarks throughout every level of the company. Helping you to retain and reinforce trademark rights and market positioning.

  • Cost control. Equally important to trademark use management; trademark protection policies allow for the definition and monitoring of specific budgets for the best results.

    No matter what the budget for registration and protection of your trademarks, our policy formats ensure that your money is invested in the right trademarks in the right markets.

    For instance if a group company changes hands, trademark protection policies are rolled out across the group. Knijff is able to rationalise and integrate the trademark protection policies of the various business units, focusing not only on your company, but also keeping in mind legislation, case law and regulation developments.

  • Active protection of trademarks can be a costly affair. It makes sense to combine trademark protection policies that monitor protection expenses with infringement policies. This will ensure consistency in controlling your trademarks, while keeping costs of any disputes in check.

  • Knijff has guided many projects globally, amending and transferring thousands of trademarks. Naturally, this requires a great deal of expertise and experience. After all, different countries have different requirements. Without a clear strategy and good management, costs can easily spiral out of control. We can help you manage your large trademark projects within a clearly set budget.

  • Planning a takeover or investment? You will want to know the live status of your trademark registration portfolio. Which trademarks are registered where, their status and any disputes: Knijff can instantly provide you with the necessary details. We can also give you an immediate update on where in the market your trademark lacks optimum protection. In the event of a business takeover, you will want to know if all the rights have been properly registered or if the trademark portfolio has any weak spots. Knijff has extensive experience in handling projects like these and is happy to guide you.

  • To be able to draw up budgets and manage accounts, you need to have full insight into the costs. The costs of a trademark registration portfolio are predictable to a large extent. Knijff provides insight into anticipated costs, broken down by trademark, country, market or calendar year, for instance. To better understand trademark costs, we are able to create a benchmark based on comparable clients with comparable trademark strategies. Combining a trademark protection policy with an infringement policy, your trademark portfolio investments are continually optimised, so you know that your budget is spent where it best reinforces the position of your trademark in the market.

  • To manage a portfolio, trademark owners require detailed trademark information. Information that is accessible anytime and anywhere. At Knijff we have developed OTMIS, a web-based platform to allows our clients 24/7 access to their portfolio. Filters and maps allow clients to easily navigate their portfolio and generate overviews for the latest information about their trademark registration portfolio, any time.

  • Many of Knijff’s trademark attorneys boast years of experience training others, for instance as part of the BMM professional education. We are happy to train our customers on location.

  • All Knijff attorneys have broad experience in specific mediation when purchasing domain names and are specialists in domain name procedures. We are also fully familiar with legal domain name arbitration procedures.

  • Knijff has its own broker-valuer department and the signatures of its brokers-valuers are court registered. This allows us to certify proxies, evidence and other official documents in-house for subsequent legalisation by a court, Ministry or Embassy to meet the often tight deadlines. This will help you save time and effort.

Tools

In addition to expertise, Knijff has developed strategic tools to support major clients in managing their portfolios.

Get great advice

Ellen Gevers //
Managing Partner & Trademark Attorney

The Church & Dwight case

We manage the entire brand portfolio for Church & Dwight, worldwide. Read more about which strategic services and tools Church & Dwight is using.

  • Historically, in the Netherlands, the professions of trademark attorney and attorney-at-law have been separated. Trademark attorneys handle trademark prosecution (applications, watching, infringements) and attorneys-at-law handle litigation (court cases). Nowadays, this separation is still there, but more often than not we team up with our clients’ legal teams. We each contribute our own specific expertise, resulting in the best and most comprehensive advice for our clients.

    Our aim is for you to benefit from the very best trademark protection. Did you receive advice from another trademark agency but want a second opinion? Then contact us. Objective advice is crucial.

  • One of the most important conditions for maintaining a trademark is its use. In other words, a trademark should be used, and used in the way it has been registered. That might prove a challenge for your average company, let alone for multinationals with subsidiaries abroad, or companies dealing with dozens of distributors.

    To make sure that everybody uses the trademark or logo in the way it was registered, we can draw up a brand manual. This can be an addition to the brand manual drawn up by a designer for the correct use of logos, for instance. Our brand manual would then describe how to use a trademark in a legally correct manner. For instance, that the ® symbol should always be used, or that the trademark should never be referred to as a verb.

  • When information about the proprietor, or even the proprietor itself, changes, the trademark portfolio is affected. The amendment will have to be registered for all trademarks across the various registers. And every country has different rules and regulations.

    Knijff has extensive expertise in monitoring large mutation projects. Expertise gained by its own legalisation department and best practice puts Knijff in the right position to handle these large projects, successfully and on budget.

  • Knijff Trademark Attorneys advise a large number of clients about the protection of their trademarks. Companies often involve us from the start and we liaise with their marketing departments about what would be the best trademark as well as the best protection.

    Once the trademark portfolio is up and running, it continues to be important that client and Knijff stay in regular contact. We can advise you on any gaps or the need for new registrations due to new legislation. This way your trademark portfolio will stay up-to-date.

  • Our Online Trademark Management System, aka OTMIS, enables our clients to access their trademark portfolio 24 hours a day.

    You can use OTMIS for a number of services, including:

    • generating overviews per trademark or per country.

    • listing key information for a particular trademark, model or domain name.

    • generating overviews of infringement procedures, watches etc.

    • listing key documents for a particular trademark.

    If you do not yet have a user name, or have lost it, contact us. It goes without saying that our webmodule and webshop are secure and that we handle all client information confidentially.

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