Trademark Clearance Search

What it does

The clearance engine is the technology behind our trademark clearance service. Give it a name or logo, plus the goods, services and countries you care about, and it works through a fixed set of steps: intake, absolute grounds, search, relative grounds and conclusions.

An attorney checks and signs off each stage before the next one starts. The technology collects and sorts the material; the legal assessment and the recommendation come from a person. Confidential content is redacted on our own hardware before any cloud AI sees it; if that check cannot run, nothing goes out. Our platform is hosted in the EU.

We also use it to screen a proposed brand top-level domain string against existing marks before an application is considered. That's where it meets our New gTLDs for Brands work.

Functions

Depth selection

You pick one of three depths: a quick check for early ideas and shortlists, a preliminary search for a preferred name, or a full clearance for a brand with serious money behind it. The steps are the same. What changes is the number of sources, the amount of review and the detail of the opinion.

Absolute grounds check

We test the sign against the absolute grounds for refusal, such as descriptiveness, lack of distinctiveness and deceptiveness. The check covers all 24 official EU languages, because a problem in just one language area can be enough to block an EU trade mark. The attorney reviews every flagged meaning.

Register and online search

We search trademarks through TMview, which brings together more than 70 IP offices, and designs through DesignView. Beyond the registers we look at domain names, the open web, social media handles, online marketplaces and company registers. You give us the sign, its variants and the classes; you get back a list of candidate conflicts and where each one comes from.

Similarity scoring

Each candidate is scored visually, phonetically and conceptually, anchored to the EUIPO's similarity tools. How similarity is judged in law is the reference for the scoring. Where the score and the legal assessment differ, the attorney decides.

Goods and services comparison

We compare goods and services using the EUIPO's harmonised database (TMclass), covering all 45 Nice classes. Cross-class checks flag marks in other classes whose goods or services are still similar to yours.

Coexistence agreement check

When we find a conflict, we check whether a coexistence agreement on record bears on it. That shows the attorney what has been accepted before and whether approaching the earlier owner is realistic.

Brand naming screen

Before candidate names enter clearance, we can screen them linguistically in 36 languages. That catches unfortunate meanings, near-homophones and sounds that don't travel.

What you receive

A structured clearance opinion. It lists each relevant conflict with a risk level, the reasoning and a recommendation: proceed, proceed with changes, proceed with monitoring, or don't proceed. You also get a comparison report that puts candidate names side by side, as a Word, Excel or PDF file.

A clearance lowers risk; it doesn't remove it. The registers only show what has been filed or published at the time of the search, and the opinion says so. What a clearance search covers is explained in more detail in the Knowledge Base.

Where it is used

Mostly before a new name is launched or filed, while changing course is still cheap. A clearance with a good result flows straight into trademark filing. We also use it when a brand grows into new goods, services or countries, before a licence or acquisition, and for naming projects with several candidates.

A matter from start to finish

An agency brings three candidate names for a client's new beverage brand, to be sold in Germany, France and Spain. The names go through the linguistic screen first, and one is dropped. The other two get a preliminary search with the goods, services and countries as the starting point. We report absolute grounds per language, then list candidate conflicts from the registers and the web, each scored for similarity. The attorney reviews each stage, sets aside irrelevant hits and writes the legal assessment. The agency gets the opinion and a comparison report, and chooses. The cleared name carries into filing with the same classes.