Trade Dress, Design Patents and Product Clearance

Your company plans to launch a significant new product to sell in your stores worldwide. Maybe your competitors are infringing upon your own company’s designs. Or, perhaps your company has received a letter from a brand or patent owner, demanding that you stop selling a certain product.

Haynes and Boone is familiar with these scenarios. A leader in product and design clearance, the firm has been involved in a wide range of such reviews. We work closely with clients to clear their products before launching, including by reviewing other company’s patent, copyright, trade dress, or trademark rights, as well as counseling clients regarding their product’s color schemes, shapes, and other characteristics. We have also enforced our clients’ own intellectual property rights in trade dress and design patent rights through demand letters and litigation, as well as during subsequent negotiation. Further, we analyze claims raised by other parties against our clients’ products, and collaborate with our client to vigorously defend each claim and come to a resolution that satisfies all parties. Our firm’s depth and experience, due to our approximately fifty intellectual property attorneys, enables us to add expertise and value to any product clearance matter.

Products that we have cleared or helped protect include footwear, purses, jewelry, lamps, ceiling fans, paper shredders, liqueur, food items, pet supplies, and electronic measuring instruments. We have conducted clearance efforts not only for products themselves, but also for product packaging, website layouts, logos, and color schemes.

We staff clearance reviews with lawyers of different backgrounds and, thus, different perspectives. Among our core practice group members, for instance, you will find recreational artists and designers, trained engineers, language and arts majors, a business major, and a sociology major. This teamwork and multi-disciplinary approach allows us to view all sides of a product, if you will pardon the pun, and provide our clients with creative and practical expert advice. In all matters, we strive for efficiency, remembering that the client’s goals and budget are of foremost importance.