Intelligent Protection and
Collaborative Advice
We offer comprehensive support for patents, trademarks, and designs – from registration to international enforcement. We conduct searches and analyses, prepare expert opinions, and develop IP strategies. We also assist you in legal disputes and court proceedings, and represent foreign law firms and companies in front of official bodies. In addition, we take care of monitoring and paying annual fees. Trust and collaborative advice at eye level form the basis of our work.
Designs
Design is the appropriate intellectual property right if you want to protect the design/form of your product. New products that are part of a collection or model series can be protected as a group in so-called collective applications.
Designs: Protection for Form and Aesthetic
In the field of designs, we offer comprehensive services to protect your creative works – tailored, strategic, and globally connected.
- Strategic advice on the registration of designs, development of individual strategies for securing your creative works
- Similarity searches and creation of market overviews
- Design applications in Germany at the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) and Community design applications in the EU at the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), as well as via the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Deposit of Industrial Designs at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
- National design applications abroad through our worldwide, long-standing network of legal colleagues
- Cancellation proceedings
- Enforcement of designs
- Responding to or initiating warning letters
- Management of design portfolios
- Monitoring and payment of renewal fees
- License agreements
Registration
Together with you, we examine whether an individual or collective application is suitable for your new product design. We select the optimal representations of the design for the application with you. We handle your application during the registration process before the various authorities.
Foreign Applications
Protection for designs can also be extended abroad through registration. This is particularly easy to do by directly obtaining a Community design for you, which is valid in all member states of the European Union. In countries that recognize the international design, we can also directly apply for the registration of an international design for you. For the registration of national designs abroad, we work together with local colleagues, with whom we have been cooperating for decades.
Defense and Enforcement of Designs
Following the registration of your design, we advise you in the event of challenges to its legal validity and represent you in cancellation proceedings.
As the owner of designs, we support you in enforcing your claims. We examine whether competitors’ products infringe your registered intellectual property rights or your unregistered Community designs. We handle correspondence for you to clarify potential conflicts, for example in the case of warning letters, and we represent you in court infringement proceedings. We are also your point of contact if third parties believe their rights are infringed by the manufacture or distribution of your products. In these cases, we examine whether there is indeed an infringement of intellectual property rights and represent your interests vis-à-vis the third parties who assert an infringement of their protective rights.
License Agreements
Well-designed products can be used in a variety of ways. In the event that you want to cooperate with distribution partners or outsource manufacturing to third parties, registered designs offer themselves as a basis for license agreements. We support you in negotiations about licenses, including drafting contracts.
Your legal experts for Designs
Ute Stork
Dipl.-Chem. Patent attorney