How Important are Trademarks and Should You File One Yourself?

Hey, guys, Matt Paulson here. In this video, I want to talk about trademarks. Whether or not you should get one and whether or not you should try to do it yourself, or whether or not you should hire an attorney. Many small business owners get heartache when it comes to using the services of a competent business attorney. Attorneys are expensive. You pay a couple grand to do some pretty basic work, in your opinion. Sometimes you feel like you can do the work yourself using templates that you find on the Internet or using a service like LegalZoom. Some basic things you can do yourself. But attorneys aren't there for when everything goes right. You want to have them in your back pocket for when things don't go right. And you need a legal professional to get you out of a business or a legal mess. Somebody just posted on my Facebook group, Entrepreneurs of Sioux Falls on Facebook, about how they were able to research the trademark application process, file a trademark themselves using the information on the USPTO's website. And they did use an attorney. Said they spent about an hour researching it and doing the application. And sometimes this will work out okay. You get your trademark approved and you're on your way. But again, attorneys are there for when things don't go. So right now, trademark trademarks will basically protect your business name by being used from somebody else in your category. So I've got a trademark on MarketBeat. So nobody else can use that in kind of the financial services or the media space. That wouldn't. Somebody wouldn't stop somebody from opening a grocery store called MarketBeat if they really wanted to. If you have a very unique business name, you have kind of a funny spelling, you can usually get a trademark. But if there are already other people using your business name or you have a very generic business name, you might not be able to get a trademark. A lot of people use weird spellings in their name of their business to make it trademarkable, like Lyft. Lyft instead of Lift. I suspect one of the reasons it's got a Y instead of an I is because that makes the brand trademarkable. If you have a really generic business name like, I don't know, Matt's Grocery Store, that might be difficult to trademark, or better, Laundromat, that would be difficult to trademark. My advice is typically to get a trademark for your business if you can. It just adds some credibility to your brand name. If you can do it, go ahead and do it. They're not that expensive and they're just good protection. There are a lot of things that can go Wrong with the trademark application. I really don't think this is something you should do yourself. For example, if you file your trademark in the wrong category, somebody else could legally use your brand name and wouldn't be able to do anything about it because you don't have a valid trademark on the right category of trademarks, a USPTO examiner, they could think your trademark is too similar to an existing trademark and they might reject it. In my case, we had problems getting the Markerbee trademark. Our brand name used to be Analyst Ordinance Network. Terrible name. Thankfully, we're not using it anymore. But, you know, I bought the domain name MarketBeat and MarketBeat.com, net IO biz. I bought all of them in 2015, and I figured, okay, let's try to get a trademark on this to really cement the protection of this brand that we are investing a lot of money into. So I worked with Path Connect at Boyce Law Firm to file my trademark. He picked out the classifications for our business. He filed the application for us and monitored it just as it kind of worked its way through the trademark system that USPTO has. And initially the USPTO thought that my trademark was too descriptive, and they issued an office action to reject it. So basically, you can't have a trademark name like African grocery store or sports gear company because the name is too descriptive of what the business does or it's just not unique enough. But my attorney was able to successfully argue that Markerbee had multiple meanings, and he was able to overcome that office action. So it ended up taking about 15 months. It cost a few thousand dollars to do, but we were able to get our trademark approved in spite of an initial rejection from the trademark office, our patented trademark office. And now I'm very happy I have the trademark. It's a very valuable IP to us. But if I tried to file it myself, I probably would have given up after the trademark examiner initially rejected my trademark. But because I was working with a competent business attorney, we were able to overcome that initial rejection and get the trademark. It was definitely a good thing that we got our trademark approved because we've had other companies try to use the Markbeat name since we got it trademarked. One of the big stock exchanges launched a podcast called MarketBeat. We had to send them a letter saying, please don't use this name. We have a trademark for it. And after they saw that we had a trademark for it, they immediately stopped using it. There was another website that launched trying to use the Markerbeat name. They actually bought ads on our website. So we had to send them another letter saying, please don't use our name. We got a trademark on it. Gotta protect our trademark. Stop it. They saw that we had the trademark and then they stopped using the name and they relaunched their site under a different brand. Again, we're not trying to go after anybody, but you do have to protect your trademark or you tend not to lose it. Or you tend to lose it if you don't protect it over time. If you're looking for a trademark for your business, there's a guy named Sean Caufold, local business attorney. He posted some good advice to my Facebook group about it. He said, there's a lot of nuances to trademark applications and making mistakes on your application can cause you to lose your trademark or cost you thousands of dollars yourself. If you want to file a trademark yourself again, I don't think you should do it. I think you should hire a competent business attorney to do it for you. Yes, it's expensive, but you're investing in the long term IP intellectual property of your business. But if you think I'm just going to do it myself, I'm determined to do that. At least take the time to meet with an attorney and get an initial consultation before doing it yourself, just so that you don't make a big mistake. A lot of law firms do free consultations to determine what your options are and whether or not you need protection for your brand with an attorney. And that way you don't screw up any of the nuances of filing your trademark. But if you run into situations like I did where there is somebody violating your trademark, you know having that trademark registered with the USPTO is very valuable and just a really good protection for you to have in your business.