Crawford
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW
WHAT WE DO:
General IP Counseling
Unlike other firms who claim to have IP lawyers, we have experience and expertise in providing all types of intellectual property protection, including utility, design, plant, and provisional patent protection. This enables us to provide a full suite of protection for your creative work. Sometimes more than one type of protection is available. We understand the benefits and limits of each type of protection so we can offer optimally targeted protection that is specifically tailored to our clients' needs and goals.
Patent Procurement
From the initial disclosure process to developing and implementing strategies for protecting your intellectual property, we partner with clients to ensure that every aspect of the invention is fully protected. In addition to guiding clients through patent preparation and prosecution, we prepare patentability, clearance, freedom-to-operate, due diligence, validity, and infringement opinions. We also negotiate, prepare, and review agreements to preserve client rights when licensing, developing, and marketing their inventions.
Trademark Counseling
Trademarks take many forms such as words, designs, sounds, colors, smells, and motion sequences motions. They are any attribute or name of a product or service that becomes known by consumers as designating a particular source.
Beginning with its inception, the firm has included a strong trademark practice. We use a variety of searching tools to assess the availability of prospective marks. We use state-of-the-art software and techniques to monitor client trademark portfolios. We counsel clients on a variety of related topics, including infringement risks, preventing infringement and dilution, fighting infringing entities, domain name registration, and use of trademarks on the Internet.
Copyright Registration
From multi-million dollar software programs to the music written and recorded local musicians, we believe our clients' expressions are valuable and deserve our vigilance. Our firm has considerable experience in helping its clients obtain and protect their rights against unauthorized copying
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In addition to copyright registration, we advise our clients in a variety of copyright-related areas, including qualifying for copyright protection, copyright infringement, fair use, licensing, seeking permission to use copyrighted works, and using and protecting works on the Internet.
Related Matters
In addition to preparing and prosecuting intellectual property applications and providing counsel on IP matters, we author opinions concerning availability of protection, clearance, freedom-to-operate, due diligence, validity, and infringement. We also negotiate business contracts concerning IP and prepare agreements regarding intellectual property.
Mediation and Arbitration
We provide all types of mediation, including collaborative mediation. Unlike most conventional business mediation, this type of mediation relies upon an open dialogue between the parties. The parties remain together in the same room throughout the process. The mediator facilitates discussion and allows the parties to achieve their own settlement without filtering messages carried between parties resulting in a settlement that parties are more likely to uphold. Although we believe collaborative mediation produces better results, we provide conventional mediation services whenever the parties request them.
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We also provide arbitration, including FINRA arbitration.
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