Monetizing Alt Legal Trademark Application Match + Tips to Help You Increase Revenue
Alt Legal Team | December 18, 2022
Trademark monitoring is an essential part of trademark practice and ownership. Brand owners invest an extraordinary amount of resources in developing brands, registering trademarks, and ultimately monetizing their brands. It’s essential that brand owners invest just as much into monitoring and enforcing their trademarks as they did into developing and commercializing them.
Unfortunately, the market for trademark monitoring and watch services has very much been all-or-nothing given the cost of these services. Either clients choose to invest in monitoring their marks, or they don’t. This has been a common point of frustration among clients and law firms alike. The adverse result of the current market is that law firms are losing out on many opportunities to connect with clients and generate new business opportunities through enforcement actions like preparing a cease and desist or other demand letter, an opposition proceeding, a letter of protest, or even new trademark applications.
As a solution, Alt Legal offers a comprehensive, cost-effective alternative to traditional trademark watch services with Alt Legal Trademark Protection. Alt Legal Trademark Protection includes Trademark Application Match and §2(d) Trademark Watch. These powerful tools monitor your entire USPTO docket and provide a fully-automated watch solution that tracks USPTO filings at critical points during the trademark prosecution process and alerts you of potential infringement at the earliest possible point.
This article will address how Trademark Application Match works, how much it costs, and most importantly, how you can monetize your subscription to Trademark Application Match and increase revenue at your firm. Also, be sure to check out our webinar about how you can increase revenue and achieve a positive ROI with Alt Legal Trademark Protection: Watch Your Revenue Grow: Monetizing Alt Legal’s Trademark Protection Service
How does Trademark Application Match work?
Trademark Application Match monitors your entire USPTO trademark portfolio using a proprietary algorithm that searches for potentially infringing new trademark applications and returns only the most relevant results.
Trademark Application Match notifies you any time a new USPTO application is filed that has identical or significantly overlapping literal elements to your USPTO trademarks. In cases where there are multiple literal elements in the mark, Trademark Application Match will identify matches with 2 or more literal elements that match. Trademark Application Match will also match plural forms and forms with and without prefixes/suffixes. Trademark Application Match will not match single words and letters unless there is a class overlap.
Each week, you’ll receive a report in Excel format that you can quickly scan to identify potential conflicts.
How much does Trademark Application Match cost?
As with our docketing, we make pricing for Trademark Application Match simple and straightforward – there are no hidden fees. Unlike traditional monitoring services that are generally cost-prohibitive for your entire portfolio and generate an overwhelming number of results, Trademark Application Match is designed to provide the most relevant results for a competitive, flat fee that is a fraction of the cost of traditional monitoring services. Below is some sample pricing for adding Trademark Application Match to your Alt Legal IP Docketing Software subscription:
| Total Docketed Matters | Monthly Docketing Price | Monthly Trademark Application Match Add-On | TOTAL | Annual Trademark Application Match Cost/Mark |
| 50 | $50 | $25 | $75 | $6.00 |
| 100 | $100 | $35 | $135 | $4.20 |
| 200 | $195 | $50 | $245 | $3.00 |
| 400 | $295 | $80 | $375 | $2.40 |
| 600 | $425 | $100 | $525 | $2.00 |
| 800 | $525 | $125 | $650 | $1.88 |
How can I monetize Alt Legal Trademark Application Match to generate more revenue?
Many firms are creating a monitoring package that incorporates both access to their docketed matters through Alt Legal IP Docketing Software and monitors their USPTO trademarks using Alt Legal Trademark Protection. By monitoring the trademark using Trademark Application Match and §2(d) Trademark Watch, firms are not only recouping the cost of Alt Legal Trademark Protection but generating additional revenue through new enforcement matters.
For example, you could consider offering monitoring services to your clients using Trademark Application Match and §2(d) Trademark Watch for a low subscription fee or simple flat fee that includes the cost of the service and the value of your time you’d spend monitoring and updating clients on the mark. You could readily charge around $95 annually for each client or each mark in their portfolio, depending on the risk level you’ve assessed with their mark and the amount of time you reasonably expect to spend reviewing matches and citations.
Offering monitoring services with Alt Legal Trademark Protection truly benefits both you and the client – not only are you offering a blanket and cost-effective way to protect against many instances of infringement, but you’ll be able to recoup the cost of the service PLUS you’ll likely get new business opportunities from this offering.
What kinds of services can I offer if I discover potential infringement using Alt Legal Trademark Protection?
Every situation calls for a different response, but the toolkit for responding to infringement includes several complex, high-level legal tasks that can generate billable work. Initially, you can offer to conduct some research into the potentially infringing mark and the applicant as you develop an opposition strategy. All of this work is billable. Following the initial research, you may propose one or more of the following:
- File a Letter of Protest
- Send a Cease & Desist letter
- File a Notice of Opposition (if the mark proceeds to publication)
- File a suit in federal court
- File additional trademarks, file in additional classes of goods/services, and/or file trademarks in other jurisdictions
All of these enforcement services will certainly require billable time, but equally important, firms that proactively advise clients of potential infringement generate goodwill with clients and have more points of engagement with clients to stay top of mind to generate even more business and future referrals.
For more on developing opposition strategies and generating business development opportunities, see our article, How to Use Alt Legal’s Section 2(d) Trademark Watch Service to Generate New Business and Impress Your Clients. Also, check out our webinar, 2(D)iscover Potential Infringement: Using Alt Legal’s §2(d) Watch Effectively.
Customer Success with Alt Legal Trademark Protection
See how one customer has effectively used Alt Legal Trademark Protection to bring in new business, check out this article.