08.24.09
Poor Man Trademark Diligence
If your trade name is going to be crucial to your business–and perhaps even if it’s not going to be crucial–you may want to do a trademark search to see whether there are any other businesses already using the name. You can hire a company online to do the search (type “Trademark search” in Yahoo, and you’ll get plenty of options–needless to say, we don’t vouch for any of them) or you can hire an intellectual property attorney to help you.
Most new businesses, though, aren’t investing a lot of money into name recognition, so it normally isn’t cost-effective to pay for a trademark search. I typically suggest they run random searches in online search engines and see what pops up (the “poor man’s trademark search”). If they’re feeling motivated, I tell them to try the USPTO website as well. It offers free federal trademark searches.
