Trademark Registration & Brand Protection
Before you invest in a brand name, a trademark clearance search can help assess whether the name appears available and identify potential conflicts before launch. Accord & Shield Legal handles clearance, federal registration, and brand-protection matters for businesses in Arizona, California, and Texas.
Your brand is one of your most valuable assets. We help you clear, register, and defend your trademarks so the name and identity you’ve built stay yours.
Your business name, logo, and brand are how customers find and trust you — and they’re worth protecting. A registered trademark gives you powerful legal rights to stop others from trading on your reputation. Accord & Shield Legal helps businesses across Arizona, California, and Texas secure and defend their brands.
Trademark Services
We guide you through the full lifecycle of brand protection:
- Trademark clearance searches — confirming your mark is available before you invest in it
- Federal trademark registration — preparing and filing your application with the USPTO
- Responding to office actions — addressing examiner objections to keep your application alive
- Trademark monitoring — watching for infringing uses of your mark
- Enforcement — cease-and-desist letters and action against infringers
- Licensing and assignment — putting your brand to work or transferring it
Trademark and copyright matters at Accord & Shield are supported by our of counsel attorney, Alexandra (Sasha) Berkowitz, whose practice focuses on trademark law — with more than a decade of experience helping small and mid-sized businesses across industries secure and protect their intellectual property. Practice before the USPTO is federal, so businesses nationwide can work with us on federal trademark registration, office actions, and copyright registration, subject to the scope of each engagement.
And because that work happens inside a business-law firm rather than a standalone filing service, the mark never gets treated as an isolated form: the licensing agreement that monetizes it, the contractor clause that protects it, and the diligence schedule that carries it through an acquisition can all be handled under the same roof.
Clear It Before You Build It
One of the costliest branding mistakes is investing in a name someone else already owns. Before you commit, we run a clearance search to assess whether your mark is available — saving you from a forced rebrand or an infringement claim down the road.
Federal Registration Done Right
The trademark application process has traps for the unwary — wrong filing basis, overbroad descriptions, weak specimens. We prepare your application carefully to give it the best chance of approval, and handle examiner objections if they arise.
Defending Your Brand
Registration is only valuable if you enforce it. We help you monitor for infringement and take action when someone uses your mark without permission — protecting the reputation and goodwill you’ve worked to build.
Your brand, defended.
Clearance, registration, and enforcement to secure your name and identity.
Office Actions & Keeping Your Registration Alive
Filing is only half the story. Most applications draw at least one refusal or requirement from the USPTO, and a registration has to be maintained after it issues — those are the steps that decide whether a mark makes it through and stays in force.
- Office action responses — answering USPTO refusals and requirements, including likelihood-of-confusion and descriptiveness refusals
- Specimen & use issues — correcting specimens and evidence of use the examining attorney rejects
- USPTO post-registration audits — responding when the USPTO requires proof of use to keep your registration intact
- Maintenance & renewals — tracking deadlines and filing what keeps a registration in force
- Coexistence & consent agreements — resolving conflicts by agreement rather than prolonged proceedings
- Domain-name disputes (UDRP) — recovering domains registered in bad faith through WIPO and Forum arbitration
Copyright Registration & Content Protection
Your brand is more than a name. The website your developer built, the content your team writes, the photos, courses, and software you create — those are protected by copyright, and registration is what turns that protection into leverage.
- Copyright registration — websites, marketing content, software, photography, courses, books, and product designs
- Group registrations — efficiently registering batches of photographs or published content
- Copyright Office correspondence — responding to refusals and examiner questions
- DMCA takedowns — removing stolen content from websites and platforms, and responding to wrongful takedowns with counter-notices
- Assignments & licensing — transferring and monetizing your copyrights with clear agreements
- Work-for-hire & ownership language — making sure the contractors you pay don’t legally own what they create for you
- Content-clearance counseling — assessing fair-use and permission questions before a campaign launches
Copyright questions rarely travel alone — they connect to contracts, contractor agreements, and deal diligence. See our Intellectual Property practice for the full picture.
Trademarks FAQs
You gain some limited rights by using a mark in commerce, but federal registration with the USPTO gives you far stronger, nationwide protection — including the ability to enforce your rights more effectively. For most growing businesses, registration is well worth it.
Yes — strongly. A clearance search tells you whether your mark is likely available before you invest in branding and filing fees. Skipping it risks a rejected application or an infringement claim from an existing owner.
Federal registration typically takes several months to over a year, depending on the USPTO’s review and whether any objections arise. We’ll set realistic expectations for your specific application.
If someone infringes your mark, options range from a cease-and-desist letter to formal enforcement action. We’ll assess the situation and recommend the most effective and proportionate response.
Yes — and that is the point of doing it this way. Trademark registration is handled by our of counsel trademark attorney, while the contracts, licensing agreements, entity work, and deal diligence that surround a brand are handled by the same firm. A standalone filing service registers a mark; an integrated firm makes sure the mark, the contracts, and the deal all tell the same story.
Yes. We register copyrights for websites, software, marketing content, photography, courses, and other creative work, handle Copyright Office correspondence, prepare DMCA takedown notices for stolen content, and draft the assignment and work-for-hire language that keeps ownership where it belongs — with you.
For federal trademark work, yes. Practice before the USPTO — applications, office actions, and post-registration maintenance — is federal, so businesses nationwide can work with us on federal trademark registration, office actions, copyright registration, and related federal intellectual-property matters, subject to the scope of each engagement. Matters governed by a specific state’s law are a different question, and we will always tell you plainly which is which.
Protect What You’re Building.
The best time to protect your brand is before someone else claims it. Let’s check your position and lock it down. Consultations begin with our founding attorney, and trademark and copyright matters are then supported by our of counsel trademark attorney — one intake, one firm, the whole picture.